The Mocked Miss’s Hidden Crowns novel Chapter 418

Years ago, she was just one of fifteen kids sent to SunLight Sanatorium. Most of them had been tossed aside by their families, struggling with problems regular hospitals couldn't fix. They thought they were going to a safe place, but it turned out to be a nightmare.

The director was a middle-aged man with his own twisted mind. He took in abandoned kids, not to help them, but to use them as test subjects in his sick experiments. He wanted to numb their spirits, to turn them into people who would follow his every order.

She and Stella were part of that unlucky group, but they were the only two who hadn’t lost themselves. When they finally understood what the director was really doing, and saw their friends being tormented until they barely looked human, they promised each other they’d get everyone out.

They almost made it. But during their escape, someone slipped up and the plan got out. The director snapped. He locked Stella in his lab and cut her over and over with a scalpel, leaving hundreds of wounds.

When his crimes started to come to light, he went even further. He set the place on fire, hoping to erase all the evidence. Charlotte fought her way out of the locked room, battered and bleeding, her hands torn up from the struggle... but she was too late.

All the kids, except for Stella who’d been left to die in the lab, had already been poisoned. The others were gone.

Charlotte used every ounce of strength she had to pull Stella out of the burning building. But everyone else, the friends she’d lived with day after day, were lost forever in that fire.

She had promised she’d get them out. She’d promised they’d all get a new start together.

“Charlotte…”

Stella’s weak voice snapped her back from the memories. Charlotte looked at her and tried to smile, her voice gentle. “It’s alright. It’s over now.”

Stella just looked at her, pale and silent.

“We made a promise, remember? We said we’d start over.” Charlotte grabbed a tissue and wiped away the tears from Stella’s cheeks. “Our brothers’ and sisters’ dreams are still waiting for us to make them real.”

Slowly, Stella’s breathing calmed. Bit by bit, some color returned to her face. She blinked, as if remembering. Their dreams were still there, waiting.

When Stella finally fell asleep, Charlotte slipped out into the hallway. She found the housekeeper and said quietly, “For the next month, you have to be extra careful. We can’t let anything like today happen again.”

Stella was already holding on by a thread. She couldn’t survive another shock.