3
“Stop! Stop this instant! This is a sin!”
Mrs. Curtis’s arrival interrupted Gabriel’s actions. I fell from his grasp onto the floor, coughing violently, my mouth full of a bloody taste.
Mrs. Curtis looked at the scene before her and sighed deeply. She helped me up.
“Aria, are you alright?”
I managed to say a few words with difficulty: “I’m fine.”
Mrs. Curtis’s whole body shook. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing: “Aria, you… you can speak?”
She suddenly seemed to age a decade, too weak to stand. Tears streamed down her face as she muttered, “It’s over, it’s all over…”
Gabriel looked at her strangely and asked, “Mom, what’s wrong?”
Mrs. Curtis’s voice was heavy with age and sorrow; “Years ago, when the Curtis family was in crisis, your father paid a great price to have our fortunes read. The fortune–teller said that if you married a mute woman with a matching birth chart, it would protect the Curtis family’s fortunes from decline.”
“But when the mute woman speaks, the Curtis family… will be ruined!”
The fortune was correct, but it didn’t account for the fact that I was pretending to be mute because of my cursed words.
Gabriel didn’t believe it, scoffing at the idea: “That’s all superstition to trick old people like you. Our Curtis family’s wealth is what we’ve earned ourselves. What does it have to do with Aria Stone?”
“If she really had such power, how come she couldn’t even raise her own son properly?”
Mrs. Curtis wanted to say more but held back. She had doubted it too, but the Curtis family’s business had rapidly improved after Gabriel married Aria. Mr. Curtis had died just two years after getting the fortune read.
Part of her had to believe it, while another part hoped it wasn’t true.
