Reacting to Helluva Boss [English Version] (Stolitz)

Truth Seekers

"Octavia?"

The aforementioned sobbed and she turned to look back without actually being surprised, she had already had in mind that at any moment her father was going to enter the room to at least know if she was okay.

Stolas took a few slow steps inward and stopped when he was already inside the room but still close to the door, seeming to first make sure that his presence was welcome.

He maintained a soft and sad expression at the same time while he directed his dull but understanding gaze towards his daughter, and she herself had to suppress her desire to burst into tears once again, feeling how that look caused another tear to be forcefully expelled out of her eyes and ran quickly over her already quite wet cheek.

There had been so many times in which she had preferred to ignore what was happening around her and pretend that that look on her father's face only meant a little tiredness from work or something similar. In whatever way, this was not a thought she could keep trying to believe. It was clear to her how there had been more sensitive issues going on for a long time in her family environment and that all her father had tried to do was keep her out of them. Even if it didn't mean a nice chapter in the story of his own life.

There were not one, not two, not three, much less the times in which when a vase or a mirror or any other object had landed with great impact and speed on her feet or near her, she had only tried to pretend that she had not seen or heard anything; in which she had just turned up the music on her headphones and she had decided to think that her mother was just a little angry and that her actions were normal and common.

Or in the times when simply the noise of a random object breaking reached her hearing field, being accompanied by the angry screams of his mother and the not-so-loud pleas of his father that came out in an attempt to stop or at least lighten the rage with no real reason that her mother showed almost all the time.

Or in which she was able to notice the couple of bruises that her father, with very little success, had tried to hide under his hand and some time later under a little bit of makeup.

It was just her mother being angry about her father's cheating, right?

There was no other explanation.

And if there was, she didn't want to accept it.

There was a time when she had come to think that her parents might have had feelings for each other somewhere in their relationship, that they had at least become friends. However, now she knew that this was something impossible, it was not possible to have loved someone in the past and in the present be capable of wanting to hurt them that much, of that she was sure.

If her mother had been capable of sending someone to murder her father, what else had she been capable of before? What else was she capable of now?

Where was the perfect, happy family she once had?

Or rather, the one she thought she had.

What would have happened if she had never seen the recordings that showed her mother's true face? Could she ever have learned the truth regarding her mother by herself? How much longer would she and her father have had to endure her mother's abuse until she realized that that's what it always was: abuse? How much more time would she have needed to accept that reality?

And just as her father had managed to hide something as big as their real family situation from her, what other things had he hidden and was he continuing to hide?

So many questions, thoughts and feelings attacked her mind like an avalanche and Octavia could only hide her face in her knees, suddenly feeling a little dizzy.