Twelve Years ago.
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"Don't let go of me, Ver". The dulcet voice of her mother called out and the thirteen-year-old nodded as their grips tightened.
Beside them was her ten-year-old brother being held by his father. Both children smiled at each other in excitement. They'd always wanted to go to the annual festival used to celebrate the founding of the city and the opening ceremony was marked by an amazing display of fireworks.
The city square was crowded with people and you couldn't take two steps without bumping into someone else so it wasn't exactly safe to bring little children.
Everyone had their eyes lifted towards the sky in anticipation and Veronica's father raised her younger brother to sit across his shoulder.
"No fair!", Veronica whined and her mother chuckled while her younger brother stuck his tongue out.
That was when it all happened...
The sound of gunshots instead of fireworks threw the whole crowd into a frenzy. People screamed and shoved one another frantically trying to escape from the unknown shooter. But the sound of the gunshots was swallowed by the pandemonium as people kept struggling to reach a safer place.
Before Veronica's young eyes, her father fell over with her brother still on his head and they were crushed by the stampede almost immediately...
The way her father's eyeball popped out from its socket told her he died almost immediately.
Her body froze in fear right before her mother pulled her arm, urging them both to follow the crowd like her husband hadn't just died. But then she turned once to stare at Veronica with a tear-stained face and a forced smile.
That was when a man forcefully pushed past her and she fell on her back. Her skull was crushed within the next few seconds and that was when Veronica's mind broke. She screamed at the top of her lungs as the crowd continued to bump against her before someone grabbed her arm.
The individual's grip was incredibly strong and Veronica cried out begging the woman to go after her mother.
"They're dead, kid!". She yelled out without turning and Ver continued to look back at her mother's bleeding corpse laying on the floor till it was out of sight completely.
After they managed to reach a free road, the woman stopped to catch her breath and Veronica pulled her arm away wanting to go back and save her mother but the woman grabbed her wrist once again. "Where do you think you're going?!".
"They need to go to a hospital", the child said with a reddened face and eyes lined with tears. "I can't leave my family there".
"Fuck...", the middle-aged woman dropped to both knees before gripping both of Veronica's shoulders to shake sense into the poor girl. "I'm so sorry, but your mother is dead. And if you saw your father fall too, he's probably dead as well".
Her eyes widened and her body began to tremble at how blunt the woman had been.
"If you go back there, you're gonna die as well, kid!".
"I...I don't care!", she yelled back pulling away from the woman before trying to run back when a car knocked her down.
By the time she regained consciousness, Veronica found herself in a hospital bed with her left leg wrapped with a cast and her skull bandaged as well.
"She's finally awake", a familiar voice said with relief to the doctor beside her.
It was later Veronica was told that she'd broken her left leg and it would take several weeks to heal before the cast could be removed. They also mentioned the fact that her brain received a series of shocks and she has to be placed under medication. After that period, Veronica began to have panic attacks and often lost consciousness when her brain couldn't take in the thought of dying—although it rarely ever happened.
Fortunately, the woman that saved her agreed to take her in.
Josephine Anderson was a middle-aged woman in her forties who never knew Veronica's family but had taken the liberty of adopting the girl for some reason.
At first, the child was a bit rebellious, but she later got comfortable living with the woman. Till her eighteen-year-old son, Zain, returned from boarding school one day. At first, he was quite nice to Veronica and often played with her.
But when his mother was out for work and Veronica was back from school, he'd offer to help her with her assignments—and his teaching methods were a bit...questionable.
He made her sit on his lap the whole time while his left hand remained on her lap.
Over time, it got worse as he began to 'punish' her whenever she didn't do well in school or made a mistake at home. And he always reminded her that his mother would send her away if she was to report.
Three years...
That was how long she spent with the Andersons, enduring regular sexual abuse from Zain.
One day while Zain was drunk, he began to tear her clothes as usual, and Veronica gathered the courage to fight back. She stabbed him repeatedly with a knife till their neighbours heard the noise and came to stop her. The boy was close to being dead but survived after being sent to an intensive care unit.
Josephine was disappointed in Veronica for never telling her and ended up siding with her son saying that Veronica had gone too far.
Everyone kept saying she'd gone too far...
She was sent to a juvenile centre where everyone kept trying to 'fix' her until after a full year when she was released at seventeen.
The company assigned to handle her parents' will and finances contacted her almost immediately after her release. Then she was sent to a boarding school where the money was used to pay for her education till halfway through university.
She'd worked hard to pay for the rest herself and an aunty from her father's side had come out to help her. They claimed to have been searching for her since the time her parents passed.
But by then...
Veronica was already damaged and had developed a fear of sexual intercourse.