Tasting

245–Like A Dog

Nora:

“Nora!” He called me out again to make sure I was paying attention to him. I kept getting zoned out, lost in my own sorrows.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention,” I apologized immediately, accepting my mistake without any argument this time as I struggled to get up. I seemed to have lost my will to fight for myself. Because even when I tried so hard, I would not make anyone believe me. They all thought of me as a liar and a bad person.

“Do you need a bandage for that?” he asked. If he hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have even noticed that I had scratched my elbow badly.

I stared at my elbow and then shook my head, forgetting to look away from the wound. “I’m fine,” I said. This small scratch didn’t hurt, but what hurt the most was them not believing me.

“Nora!” Nash cleared his throat to say something, but the moment I looked his way with a broken smile on my lips, he gasped.

“It will get infected,” he said, watching my face with sadness in his eyes. But it could be a lie; they hated me now.

“It won’t. The evil germs in me would kill anything,” I muttered, zoning out as I kept staring at my wound. I had come here to find a family, to fix everything. But now I was broken too, broken beyond repair. And who was to blame for it? Just me.

“Nora!” Nash snapped his fingers in front of my face. I gave him a broken smile that faded away too quickly.

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“I’m fine,” I repeated, not letting him starl quickly brushing past him to my bedroom.

As I neared my room, I heard him say, “I’m really hurt that you thought I spent time with you that day just to create the perfect scene for my brothers to commit a crime.”

I understood what he meant. I hadn’t mentioned our makeout session and dance in the report, but I did talk about Nash spending time with me just so the whistleblower could escape and they could blame the monsters for the murder.

“Do you have any idea what would have happened if someone else got their hands on that file? We brothers would have been put under intense scrutiny, and given our wolves, we would have been deemed monsters. So yeah, you didn’t just disappoint us—you hurt us deeply,” I heard him say, his voice heavy with emotion. I slowly began to understand the pain I had caused them.

I cannot always blame the chaos around me on others. Just like how I thought they had committed such a heinous crime, they also believed I had been causing trouble in the mansion.

“I’m sorry–,” I turned to apologize, but he was already gone.

I stared at the empty space where Nash had stood, wondering if we could ever recover from this situation. Not to mention, Lord Atwood had been very upset with me. As his name popped up in my mind, I wondered what would have happened if Silas had told him about the file.

Besides, was he still considering making me their stepsister on paper now?

Everything was a blur, and I could barely focus on anything around

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245 Uke & Dog

1. me. I didn’t belong anywhere. Once I entered my bedroom, a knock on the door made me attend to whoever was outside. There was no one– just a tray with some sandwiches and a bagel.

I looked up and saw Cain standing in the doorway of his studio, his hands in his pant pockets. Now that everything was so confusing, I couldn’t understand if he had sent me food because I couldn’t grab anything earlier when Natalya started panicking, or if he did it to keep me from going downstairs and bothering Natalya with my presence.

And then I concluded, he must have sent me food so that I don’t sit and

eat with them.

Flashback:

I sat under the table with a bowl in front of me, staring at the content of it. The steak had been blended and made into a thick gravy.

I was asked to eat on the ground like a dog, from a bowl of my dead dog.

Tears welled up in my eyes as they la

they landed on my father and brother.

He was the best thing ever to happen to my parents, and I was nothing. compared to him.

End of Flashback.

Today, the tray reminded me of that night and I felt like returning home after all.

At least I was used to my family mistreating me.

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