He Called The Heiress A Gold Digger

The second Richard stepped through the door of our tiny rental apartment, Mom just yanked her own pants down and scrubbed her legs with a steel wool scrubber until her skin underneath was raw and oozing blood. "If I get all clean, it'll be okay. Once I'm clean, Richard will come find me," she muttered to herself. Richard Mercer, in his custom-tailored suit, was absolutely seething. He shoved her away so hard she flew six feet across the room. "You were the gold digger who bailed the second you heard I went bankrupt, taking all my money with you!" he snarled. "You've got some nerve playing the crazy fool now? You shameless leech, don't think I'll go soft on you!" A soft-spoken, elegant-looking woman stepped out from behind him, and roughly dragged me out of the closet where I'd been hiding. "This must be Elena's kid with some other guy, isn't she?" she said, her voice dripping with fake sweetness. "She's already so big. Don't get mad, Richard. She was with you for seven years, after all. We can just take them back and look after them, that's all." Richard's face turned thunderous. "Do whatever you want. But a lunatic and a bastard don't get to be members of the Mercer family. They work as servants, that's it." He slammed the door and stormed off. The woman's sweet facade dropped instantly. Rosalie Marlowe leaned in, a smug smirk on her face. "Hey, you little bastard," she whispered. "Let me tell you a secret. I'm the one who targeted your mom so badly she lost her mind. Now it's your turn. Scared?" I just blinked. I didn't cry, and I didn't throw a fit. Funny, I had a secret to tell them too. I'd already found my grandpa, Arthur Garrick. He was the richest man in the whole country. If anyone wanted to hurt me, they'd have to get through him first, right? Mom and I were shoved into the cramped back of a van. "Wind blows, clouds sway... rock me all the way to Grandma's bridge." She gnawed on her fingernails, humming a lullaby I didn't recognize under her breath, her head bowed. We pulled up to the Mercer family mansion. I'd barely climbed out of the van before Mom went bolting inside like a woman possessed, heading straight for the second floor like she knew the place like the back of her hand. "Richard! I came to play with you!" "Mom!" My brain went completely blank with a sharp buzz. I sprinted after her as fast as my legs could carry me. I'd just made it to the second-floor hallway when a girl in a frilly, pretty dress came running out of the master bedroom. The second she spotted Mom in her grubby, stained pajamas, she wrinkled her nose in open disgust and shoved her as hard as she could. Mom was already off balance. She hit the marble floor with a loud thud, a huge purple bruise blooming instantly on her knee. "Where'd this crazy beggar come from?" the girl yelled. "How dare you cause trouble at the Mercer house!" Before I could say a word, Richard stormed up behind us, his expression dark as storm clouds. "What's all the yelling about!" The girl's attitude flipped on a dime. She pressed her lips into a pout, pointed at Mom, and wailed. "Daddy, this lady tried to hit me just now! She scared me half to death!" I froze, rooted to the spot. When Mom was lucid, she'd always cup my face and say over and over again that Richard was my dad. Once he finds me, she said, he'd spoil me rotten, buy me the prettiest dresses and the most delicious cakes I could ever dream of. But right now? He already had another daughter, Riva Mercer, and he was looking at me like I was nothing more than a piece of trash under his shoe. I took a step forward, heart in my throat, trying to explain. "She pushed my mom first, just now—" "How can you be so vicious? You'd even hurt a child?" Richard snapped me off with a sharp snarl, his eyes blazing with pure venom as he stared at Mom, who was still sitting dazed on the floor. "Elena, you don't actually think this is still your home, do you? You don't deserve to set foot here! Rosalie is the mistress of this house now, and Riva is my only daughter!" He then turned to nod at the bodyguards behind him, his voice icy. "Throw them into the storage room. If they scare Riva again, you'll answer me!" The storage room was stuffed to the brim with random junk. A thick cloud of dust hit me the second we stepped inside, and the old quilts hung on the wall were fuzzy with mold. Mom blinked in total confusion, leaned in close to my ear, and whispered softly, "Sweetie… what's a gold digger?" I blinked back at the stinging in my eyes, tucking a strand of her soft hair behind her ear. "I know what it means, Mom. I'll talk to Dad later. Once he finds out the truth, he'll never yell at you again, I promise." Mrs. Higgins from the valley had told me before that Mom had been dumped near Silver Ridge out of nowhere. When the locals found her, she was covered in blood and didn't have a single cent on her. If she really was some greedy gold digger, how could she have ended up so poor she could barely scrounge up a bite to eat? Right after she had me, she was so hungry she'd picked discarded vegetable scraps out of garbage bins just to stay alive. I settled Mom down on the only half-decent wooden bed in the room, then scrubbed every surface with a rag for two straight hours until the place was at least somewhat livable. Just then, Richard appeared in the doorway. Mom's eyes lit up like she'd just seen the sun. She didn't even bother putting shoes on, just ran straight at him and threw herself into his arms. "Richard, there's so much dust in here… it's not clean." Richard caught her on reflex, staring down at her like he'd been frozen solid. However, the second Mom spotted Rosalie standing behind him, holding a bowl of soup, she swatted the bowl out of her hand so hard it clattered and crashed to the floor, then clamped her hands over her head and screamed. "Bad person! You're a bad person—you lied to me!" A cold, scheming glint flashed across Rosalie's eyes, and before I could blink, she was already sobbing, tears streaming down her face. "Elena, I'm your best friend. I know you're angry, but you betrayed Richard back then! You stole all the company funds, you made his grandma so upset she had a heart attack and died. That has nothing to do with me, okay? Please…" Richard's face went dark with rage so fast it was like a storm cloud had settled over it. His fingers curled so tight into fists his knuckles turned white. My stomach dropped. "That's a lie! Mom never took any money—" "Enough!" Richard sneered at me, a sharp, mocking twist to his mouth. "Rosalie was kind enough to make you soup, and this is how would you repay her? Playing the fool to frame her? You think the room's dirty? You're the ones with filthy minds!" I squeeze the rag tight in my hand. "I cleaned this room myself." He scoffed, looking down his nose at me like I was a bug under his shoe. "You're barely more than a kid, and you're already that good at cleaning? Figures, you've got a worthless, lowlife streak in you. Since you love cleaning so much, get your ass out there right now and scrub every inch of this entire villa!" My throat tightened and my eyes burned. Mom had been wrong. Dad was never going to dote on me like she'd promised, never going to put me up on a pedestal. He called me a bastard, he picked on Mom just like the awful people back in the village. It was obvious as day, he wanted nothing to do with us. That night, I hunkered down scrubbing floors until three in the morning. I wanted to sob, but I just lifted my aching, burning arm and wiped the tears away before they could fall, making no sound at all. I had to protect Mom. This wasn't the time to break down and cry. When I finally finished the last of the work, I pulled out my beat-up old flip phone, the plastic peeling off all along the edges, and dialed the number I'd memorized so many times I could rattle it off without thinking. "Hi. This is Estelle Garrick. I'm Elena Garrick's daughter."