Maxine had certainly earned her fearsome reputation through decades of operating at the very center of the Griffiths family’s power structure. Her strategic mind worked like that of a chess grandmaster, with every action carefully plotted out several moves in advance. Anyone whose thinking was even slightly less sophisticated would find themselves trapped at every turn by her elaborate schemes.
Poor Katrina had been the perfect pawn in Maxine’s game.
Maxine had played both sides perfectly. She’d sent Katrina to kill Elliana, hoping Elliana would kill Katrina, saving her the trouble of getting rid of Katrina herself. But Maxine always had a backup plan. She’d already slipped the drug into Katrina’s system before sending her out. The plan was simple and vicious. If Katrina failed and got captured, the drug would kick in and erase everything she knew. No memories meant no secrets could leak out. Maxine’s soul was colder than ice and twice as deadly.
But for all her scheming, Maxine had overlooked one crucial possibility — Jules would end up in Elliana’s hands. He’d already spilled everything about Gearveil Hall.
At that moment, Katrina reached out and gently tugged on Elliana’s sleeve, her eyes beginning to well up with tears. “You won’t hurt me, will you?”
The drug had wiped away everything that made Katrina dangerous. The killer was gone. What remained was just a scared child with nowhere to go. She looked so small and broken.
Elliana bet that as a child, Katrina had never dreamed of becoming the Griffiths family heiress. Maxine had forced that life on Katrina, breaking her down and molding her into someone cruel through years of pain and training. Now, Katrina was that little girl again. ? findnovel.net
Elliana let out a soft, sad sigh as her thoughts drifted to her mother, who had been taken in by Maxine as a young child and groomed to become an heiress through similar methods. She could only imagine the grueling training sessions and terrible suffering her mother must have endured — probably very similar to what Katrina…
Had experienced. Had her mother also spent long nights staring up at the stars during those painful moments, wondering what her real parents looked like? Had her mother dreamed about where her true home was, or whether anyone was searching for her?
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“Mom…” Elliana whispered inwardly, feeling a sharp pain lance through her chest. Even now, she had no idea where her mother was, whether she was alive and well, or what kinds of hardships she might currently be facing.
The thought of Rita suffering somewhere made Elliana’s heart race with desperate urgency. She couldn’t afford to waste another single moment — she needed to find her mother as soon as possible.
Elliana rose to her feet and turned to address Adah. “Katrina’s mind has been reset to her childhood state. She no longer poses any danger to us. Take that tracker off her ankle and let her out of this basement. She can go anywhere she wants in the villa.”
With those instructions delivered, Elliana turned and walked out of the room without looking back.
Adah glanced over at the bewildered Katrina and then knelt to study her carefully for several moments before reaching out to unlock the metal shackle fastened around her ankle.
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.
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