I Am The Game's Villain

Chapter 810: Christina Olphean SS [1]

I do not remember ever being happier in my life than I was that day.

My mother had been gone from my sight since morning. I had not been allowed to see her, and though my father and my brother kept trying to reassure me, I could not stop worrying. They told me she was fine, that everything was as it should be, that she was simply going through what she had to go through. I knew, at least vaguely, what that meant. I was not so young that I understood nothing at all. But knowing did little to calm me. The hours dragged on endlessly, and with every one of them my worry only deepened.

Yet beneath that worry was something else too, something bright and trembling that would not leave me.

Excitement.

Mother had promised me a little brother.

That thought alone was enough to make my heart race. Even as I worried for her, I kept imagining what he would look like, how small he would be, whether he would cry loudly, whether he would hold my finger if I reached out to him. I remember sitting there with that strange mixture of fear and joy sparkling together inside me, unable to think of anything but the moment I would finally be allowed to see them both.

In the end, it took the whole day.

My mother, strong as she always was, labored from morning until night before she finally gave birth. And when I was at last allowed to see her, all the fear that had been twisting inside me vanished in an instant.

She was holding Amael in her arms.

I still remember that first sight of him so clearly. He looked so small, so fragile and yet so alive, crying there with all the force his tiny body could summon. Mother looked exhausted, but radiant in a way I had never seen before, and in that moment the whole room seemed to glow with warmth that no memory has ever managed to dim.

When I saw him, something in me gave way at once.

All I wanted from that moment onward was to be there for him. To protect him. To keep him safe from everything cruel in the world. It was such a simple, instinctive feeling that I did not even need to think about it. I loved him immediately.

And as he grew, that love only deepened.

The same was true for Connor. We both became protective of Amael, perhaps because he was the youngest, perhaps because he was so gentle, or perhaps because from the beginning there was something about him that made you want to shield him from the world. He had been born with a weak constitution, and because of that all of us watched over him more carefully than we might have otherwise. Every small illness frightened us. Every sign of weakness drew our concern. We treated him like something precious, because he was.

We were a marvelous family then.

At least, that is how I remember it now.

Everything felt joyful, warm, and whole for use.

Happiness one never imagines can truly be broken until the day it is.

And then Amael fell sick.

Even now, I cannot fully explain what happened. At the time, I understood even less. Neither I nor my brother could make sense of it, and though my parents knew more than they told us, even they seemed shaken in a way that frightened me. What I did understand, what little reached me through hushed conversations and tense silences, was that Amael was in danger.

Not from sickness alone.

From someone.

Someone had tried to take his life.

I was too young then to fully grasp the horror of that. Monsters who would aim for a child did not belong in the world as I understood it. Children were supposed to be protected. They were not supposed to need protecting from the hatred of others. But that was the truth laid before us, and because of it, we were told that Amael had to be taken away.

I could never accept it.

My parents tried to explain. Connor tried to comfort me. They all told me it was necessary, that there was no other choice, that it was for Amael’s safety. But none of that made it easier. None of it changed the fact that my little brother was being torn from us while still needing us, while still too young to understand why his family was no longer around him.

In the end, he was sent away.

Sent away because there were things in this world vile enough to hunt a child.

The emptiness he left behind entered our home and never truly left. Mother suffered most of all, I think, though she hid it well. I still remember the way she handed Amael over to Aunt Oryanna. She looked barely able to hold it together. The moment itself may have looked calm from the outside, but inside it must have been tearing her apart.

And from then on, something in our family cracked.

Not all at once.

Not loudly but I could see it.

I could feel it.

Both my mother and father became consumed by what had happened to Amael. Not only by the loss itself, but by the need to understand it. To uncover who had dared to target him. To learn why. To find the ones responsible and make them pay. My father, especially, changed. He spent less and less time with us. His anger burned, and it drove him away from home more often than before. He wanted answers. He wanted justice. He wanted to bring Amael back.

I wanted that too.

I clung to that hope stubbornly. I told myself that once Amael returned, everything would go back to normal. Our family would heal. The house would feel full again. Mother would smile without forcing it. Father would stop carrying that hard look in his eyes. Connor would not seem so burdened all the time. We would just have to endure a little longer, and then things would be right again.

That was what I believed.

But it did not happen.

Not quickly.

Not at all.

Time kept passing, and the promise that everything would be restored became thinner and more fragile with each one.

Then my father died within the year.

And once again, there was no explanation.

No warning, nor final conversation.

He simply did not come home one night.

I remember almost nothing of that first moment except disbelief.

It could not be real.

That was the only thought my mind would allow. I looked at him and could not reconcile what I was seeing with what I knew of him.

Mother stood there staring at his body with an empty gaze I will never forget. She did not scream. She did not collapse. She simply looked as though something inside her had gone silent.

As for me, I do not remember much after that.

Only Connor’s arms around me.

Only the way he pulled me gently against him while I shook apart.

Only the feeling of being held before the darkness took me and I passed out in his embrace.

When I woke the next day, the numbness was gone.

And in its place was the truth.

It had been real.

Father was dead.

But beyond that, nothing made sense. Nothing became clearer. His death solved nothing, explained nothing, soothed nothing. It only added one more wound to a family already bleeding.

What had we done to deserve any of it?

That question haunted me then.

It still does now.

I had lost my father. My younger brother had been forced away from all of us because his life was in danger. My mother was breaking behind her silence. Connor was trying to keep me together while carrying his own grief. And for what? For what crime? For what sin? What had our family done to earn such cruelty?

There were no answers.

Only more pain.

And so I turned, again and again, to the one person who still seemed capable of keeping me upright.

Connor.

He became my anchor in those days. Whenever I broke down, whenever the fear and grief swallowed me too whole to bear, I would go to him. I asked him the same hopeless questions over and over, and though he had no answers either, he never pushed me away. He would hold me and tell me it would be fine. Tell me we would endure. Tell me things would one day make sense.

Back then, I needed those words.

But now, looking back, what rises in me more than anything else is guilt.

My weakness, my despair, my constant need to lean on him when he was grieving too, all of it must have fed something dangerous inside him. I see that now. My pain did not remain mine alone. It sharpened his. My desperation became part of his burden. And the more I clung to him for comfort, the more his own anxiety, his own hunger for truth, and his own need for justice must have grown.

He was saving me, both me and my mother.

But I cannot help wondering how much it cost him.

He had simply followed the same path our father had taken before he died.

I knew it.

I saw it happening long before the end came, and that was perhaps the cruelest part of it all. I watched him walk deeper into that same darkness, step by step, carrying the same stubbornness, the same refusal to turn back.

Both my mother and I tried to stop him. We pleaded, argued, I begged him to think of us, to think of what had already happened to our family, but he only kept reassuring us that everything would be fine.

I knew he had discovered something dangerous.

Not just dangerous, but deadly enough that he no longer wished to involve either me or our mother. That was how I understood the truth of it. He had learned something, some terrible truth hidden beneath all the tragedies that had befallen us, and instead of sharing it, instead of letting us carry even a part of that burden, he chose to bear it alone. He wanted to protect us. I know that now. But at the time, all I could feel was fear.

And in the end, exactly what I had feared came to pass.

He left us too.

He abandoned us, just as our father had, though not by choice, perhaps, and not in the same way. Still, the result was no different to the hearts left behind. He was gone, and my mother and I were alone.

I could not believe it had truly happened.

For a long time, I refused to believe it.

Connor had always seemed too strong to vanish, too central to my life to simply become another absence. And yet that was exactly what he became.

I resented him for leaving us.

That hatred burned in me for a long time, tangled so tightly with grief that I could barely separate one from the other. I hated that he had not listened. I hated that he had ignored every attempt we made to stop him. I hated that he had promised, more than once, that he would not leave us alone and then did exactly that in the end. It did not matter that I knew, somewhere deep down, that he had never wanted to die. Pain is rarely fair, and mine was not. It reached for him even after he was gone and blamed him for the emptiness he left behind.

But hatred was only the beginning.

The guilt came after.

I could hardly breathe beneath it.

I carried the guilt of Connor’s death inside me.

If only I had been stronger. If only I had fought harder. If only I had refused to let his refusals matter. I told myself again and again that if I had truly insisted, if I had clung to him, followed him, exposed what he was trying to hide, then I could have saved him. I do not know if that was true. Perhaps it was only the logic of someone looking for a way to make tragedy feel less meaningless. But I believed it all the same.

After his death, nothing felt real anymore.

The world became hollow, as though I were walking through the shell of a life that no longer belonged to me. Days passed, people spoke, meals were eaten, doors opened and closed, and yet all of it seemed to happen at a distance. I remained alive, but only barely, held to the thread of life by the frailest reasons. My mother was one of them. The knowledge that somewhere far away my little brother was still alive was another. Those were the only things keeping me from giving in completely.

Even then, it was hard.

Hard to keep breathing. Hard to endure each day. Hardest of all to accept what had happened and not drown in it.

My mother was worse off than I was, though she hid it better.

Connor’s death broke something in her all over again. I could see it plainly, no matter how much she tried to conceal it behind composure and strength. She had already lost too much, already been forced to endure more than anyone should, and yet she hardened herself further after his death. Not because she had become cold, but because she had to. Because if she fell apart completely, then there would be nothing left standing for either of us.

And somehow, she managed to recover enough to stay upright.

For me.

Only for me.

I knew that. I felt it in every careful word she spoke, in every time she came to check on me instead of giving in to her own pain, in every effort she made to remain calm when I knew she was breaking inside. And because I knew it, I made a choice.

I refused to share my pain with her.

I could not do to her what I believed I had done to Connor.

That thought had rooted itself too deeply in me by then. I had leaned on Connor when I was too weak to carry my grief alone, and in my guilt-ridden mind I had come to believe that my pain had only driven him faster toward death, that my despair had become one more burden pressing him toward that fatal path. Whether that was true or not no longer mattered. I believed it. And because I believed it, I swore I would not place that same weight upon my mother.

So I kept quiet.

I buried what I felt and carried it alone as best I could.

But even then, even in all that silence, I knew I still needed an anchor if I was to endure. A person cannot live forever with nothing to hold onto. No matter how much I denied my own need, it remained there all the same. And my mother, however strong she was, needed one too. Strength does not erase loneliness. It only teaches one how to hide it.

Then, at last, that day came.

Amael returned to us.

And with him, for the first time in what felt like an age, something other than grief entered our home.