Chapter 1

1

Just because I refused to donate stem cells to my older sister, my lawyer mother dragged me into court.

I desperately tried to explain to her that I had a severe blood clotting disorder. Losing that many stem cells would literally kill me.

Instead of listening, my mother screamed at me through her tears.

"Stop faking it! Do you really have to watch your sister die before you're satisfied? How did I raise such an ungrateful, heartless monster?"

In the end, I lost the lawsuit. They extracted a massive amount of stem cells from my body against my will.

After suffering an uncontrollable hemorrhage, I died a miserable death all alone in a cold, forgotten corner of the clinic.

……

I was dead.

Yet, bound by some lingering attachment, my spirit was chained to my mother. I could not take a single step away from her side.

Inside the VIP hospital room, the entire family hovered over my sister Stella's bed. My mother looked so frantic she was on the verge of tears.

This cold, fiercely ambitious powerhouse of a woman had never shown such vulnerability to me. In court, she had been a ruthless predator tearing me to shreds.

The moment Stella opened her eyes, the heavy weight on my parents' chests finally lifted.

My mother grasped Stella's hand, tears spilling freely down her cheeks.

"Sweetheart, you're finally awake! Does anything hurt? Mom will get the doctor right now."

Stella squeezed my mother's hand back and shook her head weakly. She glanced around the room, putting on a fragile, innocent look.

"Where is Nora? Why isn't she here? Is she still mad at me for taking her stem cells?"

The second my name left Stella's lips, my mother's face instantly twisted with pure disgust.

"What right does she have to be mad? That selfish piece of trash actually dragged me through a courtroom battle while her own sister was suffering!"

My mother sneered bitterly.

"She humiliated me and destroyed my reputation in front of the entire legal community!"

A sharp, familiar pain stabbed through my ethereal chest. My mother was the one who had sued me in the first place.

She had unleashed every ounce of her elite legal training just to crush me on the witness stand.

I was her biological daughter, not some dangerous felon.

Hearing my mother's words, my father slammed his fist against the wall in fury.

"Call her right now! Make that ungrateful brat get down on her knees and apologize to Stella!"

He paced angrily across the room.

"She just couldn't stand seeing Stella thrive because she wanted the entire family fortune for herself. How did I end up with such a cold-blooded monster for a daughter?"

My ghostly figure hovered right between them. We were supposed to be a family, yet not a single person spoke up on my behalf.

Even in death, they refused to let me rest, hurling filthy accusations and dirty water onto my name.

My mother snatched her phone and dialed my number several times in a row, only to be met with dead air. She cursed under her breath.

"That wretched brat thinks her wings are strong enough to rebel against us now! If we don't teach her a brutal lesson when she comes crawling back, she'll walk all over us when we're old!"

My ghostly heart withered into absolute ash. I wasn't ignoring her calls out of spite.

I was simply… dead.

I was three years younger than Stella. When I was a toddler, my father had spilled water on the kitchen floor and never bothered to clean it up.

I slipped on the wet tiles, accidentally knocking into my mother while she was eight months pregnant with Stella.

The sudden shock triggered premature labor.

Because of that early delivery, Stella had always been frail, and my mother blamed every single ounce of it on me.

She used to point a finger in my face and scream.

"If it weren't for you, you little jinx, Stella would have grown up healthy! You owe your entire life to your sister!"

Drowning in helpless sorrow, I had looked at my father, begging him with my eyes to tell the truth.

I prayed he would admit that the spilled water was his fault. Instead, he barked at me with venom.

"Why are you glaring at me? You committed a sin and now you want to drag your father down with you?"

That was the moment I realized my father would never protect me. He only cared about saving his own skin by making me the scapegoat.

Sure enough, my mother struck me across the face so hard that my ears rang for hours.

"You will kneel in front of Stella's crib all day! Don't you dare stand up until you truly understand your sins!"

I knelt on that cold hardwood floor for an entire day. I foolishly believed that if I held onto my innocence, my mother would eventually see the truth.

After all, she was a renowned, high-powered attorney who championed justice. Surely she wouldn't punish an innocent person.

Reality slapped me right across the face.

My mother reserved her precious sense of justice exclusively for strangers. The moment she kicked me hard in the chest, I finally understood how pathetically naive I had been.

Her icy glare had been filled with nothing but raw hatred.

She had sneered down at me.