The Rules He Taught Me Chapter 2

Back at the mansion, my adoptive sister, Seraphina, greeted me with feigned delight.

She ran up to me intimately, linking her arm through mine, her eyes full of apparent concern.

"Cassie, you're finally back. I missed you so much."

Her act was flawless, as if she wasn't the one who had cried to Julian about me "earning money by escorting men and ruining the family's reputation."

She pulled out a gift box from behind her back and opened it in front of me.

Inside was a black slip dress with barely any fabric and a bottle of champagne.

She smiled, her voice sweet yet malicious: "Cassie, from now on, if you want to wear or drink something, just tell Julian directly. Please, don't go to places like that to degrade yourself again."

Even more sickeningly, as she spoke, she actually reached out to unbutton the gray uniform I was wearing.

She said with disgust, "Hurry and take off this filthy outfit, it looks dirty. Cassie, let me help you change into this new dress."

Her sharp nails deliberately grazed a shallow scar on my collarbone.

Underneath that uniform, my body was covered in scars, some deep, some shallow.

Just as Seraphina's hand was about to touch the second button.

I clamped down on her wrist, using a self-defense technique I'd learned in there, twisting it outwards.

"Ah—."

Seraphina let out a piercing cry of pain, her face pale.

She stared at me in shock, her eyes filled with the horror of "how dare you," utterly unable to believe that the pushover she used to bully would possess such startling strength and reaction.

I stepped back, flung her hand away, and created distance between us.

It was then that Julian spoke, his voice carrying clear displeasure and favoritism.

"Seraphina was only trying to help you, Cassie. Be good, go change your clothes now."

He paused, his gaze falling on my uniform, and added a sentence.

"Don't bring your dirt from outside into our home."

Those words, "your dirt," pierced my heart.

My mind immediately replayed the scene at the correctional center, where several female instructors held my head down, forcing me to scrub toilets full of filth and vomit with a toothbrush.

They hosed down my body while laughing wildly.

"Clean up. Wash all that depraved filth out of your bones."

That revealing slip dress, Julian's cold words, instantly triggered my most humiliating memories.

Flashes of being tied tightly to a chair because I refused to admit to those baseless "mistakes" crossed my mind.

Icy electrodes clamped onto my temples, powerful currents coursing through my body, the agonizing pain making me almost bite through my molars, convulsing uncontrollably.

And Julian's assistant would appear at the visitation window every month.

He would ask me the same question, expressionless: "Miss Sterling, have you admitted your wrongs? As soon as you do, Mr. Sterling will take you out immediately."

Just as I was punished with three days without food, my stomach cramping from hunger, cowering in a corner, almost fainting.

A man in an instructor's uniform, during his patrol, found a blind spot in the surveillance and tossed me a piece of bread from his pocket.

His voice was cold, yet it was the only decent words I heard in that hell.

"Eat it, don't let anyone see."

"Cassie, why aren't you happy? Don't you like the dress I gave you?"

Seeing my prolonged silence, Seraphina rubbed her reddened wrist and provocatively waved the dress at me, trying to irritate me.

I didn't break down or yell in anger as she expected.

I simply, slowly, picked up that expensive bottle of champagne from beside the gift box she had offered.

I forced a smile at her hypocritical face, then slowly raised it.