Left in a Horror Game, Adopted by the Boss Chapter 03
The Thorn Garden was choked with dark red vines. The air reeked of rot and blood.
The second they shoved me inside, the vines wrapped around my ankles and sliced long gashes into my skin.
Lily screamed and buried herself in Mom’s arms.
Mom whipped out a healing potion and scanned Lily from head to toe.
“Lily, where are you hurt? Show me.”
Lily pointed at a faint red line on the back of her hand. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
Mom covered Lily’s entire hand in the potion, frantic, and didn’t leave a single drop in the bottle.
I slumped against a tree trunk, blood already running from my ankle into my shoe.
Dad glanced at me, annoyed.
“Stop faking. You’re an SS-rank. That little scratch isn’t worth wasting a potion.”
Those words yanked me right back to a memory from when I was little.
I had a fever of 104 degrees, and my teacher, Mrs. Peterson, told my parents to take me to the hospital immediately.
We’d barely pulled up to the school when Lily suddenly said her chest hurt.
Mom quickly lifted me out of the car and set me on the bench in the front office.
“Lily’s not strong. We need to get her checked first.”
“You’re a big girl. Just wait here for a while.”
That day, I waited until the school closed, and a security guard finally took me to the hospital.
When Mom and Dad showed up, they didn’t ask how I was. Mom just scolded me.
“Your sister had a full workup and they found nothing wrong. You probably scared her.”
A sharp pain snapped me back to the present.
Dad saw I wasn’t moving and yanked the chain hard. A vine stabbed into my calf.
I cried out, “Sir, I can’t use my talent today. My HP keeps dropping. Can’t you see that?”
Lily whispered from behind him, “Dad, she is the best liar.”
“If she didn’t have a talent, how could she survive three years in a dungeon?”
Dad’s jaw tightened. He forced me to the front of the group.
A monster lunged out of the flowers, heading straight for Lily.
Mom didn’t hesitate. She grabbed my shoulder and shoved me in front of Lily like a human shield.
Claws raked across my back. My vision went black, and I collapsed into the mud.
But the monster caught my scent, pulled back its claws, and slunk into the flowers with its head lowered.
Dad’s eyes lit up.
“She really can keep the monsters here in check.”
He assumed it was my SS-rank talent doing the work. He had no idea about the black mark hidden under my collar—the mark Daddy had given me. The mark of the castle master.
Lily stared at my cloak and reached for it.
“Nora, does that cloak block monsters too?”
I grabbed the fabric and held on.
That cloak was the first gift Boss Daddy ever gave me.
But Mom pried my fingers open one by one and wrapped the cloak around Lily.
“It’s just a piece of cloth. Why are you getting more selfish every day?”
Without the cloak, cold seeped straight into my wounds.
I was shaking from the pain, but Mom was too busy fastening the collar around Lily’s neck to notice, terrified she might catch a chill.
I suddenly remembered the day my talent awakened.
The system rewarded me with a rare talent stone. When Lily found out, she locked herself in her room and cried.
Dad told me to give her the stone, saying I was already SS-rank and couldn’t hog everything good for myself.
In the end, the talent stone didn’t awaken anything in Lily.
She smashed it in a rage, and Mom and Dad punished me by making me kneel all night. They said my unlucky item was the reason Lily didn’t awaken.
The stone door at the end of the garden slowly rose.
Dad looked at the glowing red runes on the door, then down at my still-bleeding wounds.
Excitement flickered in his eyes.
“As long as we have her, we’ll find the Boss.”
