Chapter 6 - The remnants of the mother
Scarlett bolted down the corridor, propelled by pure, unadulterated terror. She expected alarms to blare, expected Adrian to burst from his master suite with a weapon, but the house remained eerily silent. Lily was letting her escape, treating her not as a threat, but as a rat in a maze designed for her amusement. Scarlett fled the estate, disappearing into the storm. She needed to understand how a child could possess such monstrous capabilities. She turned her investigation back to the late mother, Elena. If Elena had commissioned the brace before the accident, she knew what Lily was becoming. Scarlett utilized a contact in the banking sector to locate a hidden safety deposit box registered in Elena's maiden name, untouched since the day of her death. Using a forged power of attorney, Scarlett accessed the vault. Inside lay a single, leather-bound diary and a collection of medical scans. The diary chronicled Elena's descent into absolute terror. Elena had been a brilliant cryptographer, and she had noticed her daughter displaying terrifying anomalies by the age of four. Lily wasn't just gifted; she possessed an unnerving, predatory intellect and a complete absence of empathy. The diary detailed how Lily would manipulate the household staff, orchestrating cruel accidents and displaying a horrific fascination with pain. Elena realized Lily was a high-functioning sociopath with an IQ that defied measurement. When Elena discovered Lily was silently observing her cryptographic work, memorizing access codes to Adrian's defense company, she panicked. Elena commissioned the hollow brace as a desperate, misguided attempt to physically restrain the child and monitor her movements, planning to use the accident as an excuse to lock Lily away in a specialized psychiatric facility. But Lily had discovered the plan. The final entry in the diary was frantic, written in shaking handwriting. She knows. She altered the telemetry of my car. She is going to kill me, and she is going to use the brace as her Trojan horse. She is hollow inside. The twist was devastating. The mother hadn't been protecting the child from the world; she had been trying to protect the world from her child. And she had paid for it with her life.
