Whispers of a Former Life: Episode 42

Charity’s knees gave out so suddenly she didn’t even register the jolt,  her tiny frame sank onto the wide, barren expanse of Alejandra’s battered coffee table, her arms trembling from the effort of holding herself upright. 

No. No. No. 
This isn’t real. 
It can’t be. 

Her blurry eyes snapped to the phone screen again, desperate for a loophole, a typo — anything. But there it was, crisp and unflinching even through the cracks in the cheap glass: 
Charity Jiménez 
Pet Name: Patrona 
Custody Status: Assigned 

Her heart thudded so violently it made her ribs ache. A cold sweat trickled down her spine under the hoodie she’d half-dragged with her from Alejandra’s lap. She felt too small for her own skin, like her bones weren’t big enough to cage the panic swelling inside her chest. 

She tried to swallow it down, tried to reach for the old voice that once dripped venom over her words, made people cower. But it only came out cracked and high, the voice of prey. 

“Alejandra.” She forced it past dry lips, her tongue thick and foreign. “Alejandra. Please. Please. You, you don’t want this. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what I cost,” 

Alejandra only watched her, perched on the edge of her battered old couch like some stone goddess, the weight of her attention more crushing than a scream. 

Charity’s vision blurred with hot, angry tears she hated herself for letting fall. She lurched forward, stumbling on her palms and knees until she could press her tiny hand against the scratched glass of Alejandra’s phone, as if she could swipe her name away like a bad app. 

“Listen to me!” She pitched her voice higher, pushing each word out like broken glass through her throat. “My family, my father will, he’ll—” 
She stopped. The word father snagged in her chest like a fishhook. The image rose unbidden: her father’s broad shoulders stooped, his booming voice whittled down to a squeak no louder than hers, collar gleaming against skin too young, too smooth, held in some distant cousin’s care. Her mother too. Reduced. Owned. Already gone. 

There was no cavalry. There would be no white-knight lawyer to swoop in with an injunction and a scowl. The entire Stevens line, all that wealth and pedigree, had withered into household pets overnight. Her brother probably not far behind. And now she, the daughter they once boasted about at charity galas, was begging her housekeeper for mercy she no longer had any right to demand. 

She crumpled forward, pressing her brow to the cold table. Her tears dripped onto Alejandra’s phone screen, smudging the digital badge that now branded her property. 

“Alejandra… please… Kira. Call Kira. She’ll take me. She’s guardian trained. She’ll, she’ll pay you. I promise. You’ll never have to scrub another toilet for my family. Just, just let her take me, and,” 

A hush fell over the room. It was so late in the morning that the city’s hum pressed through the thin apartment walls: car horns, barking dogs, the hiss of a bus’s air brakes. At her old house, these noises had been muted by thick glass and acres of manicured buffer. Here, they crawled into every crack and sang at her ears like a reminder: this is your world now. 

Alejandra leaned in, elbows on her knees, her vast silhouette blotting out the windows behind her. She didn’t speak right away. Just let Charity’s trembling words dissolve into the hiss of traffic outside. 

Then, with a soft finality that made Charity’s guts seize, the giant girl murmured: 
“Patrona.” 

The name twisted in Charity’s gut like poison. Not a title now, a leash. A collar that would never come off. 

Alejandra raised one massive finger, slow, deliberate, and traced the air just above Charity’s head, not quite touching her hair, but close enough that the air shifted around her tiny scalp. Charity froze, trembling so hard her bones ached. 

“You’re not calling Kira,” Alejandra said, her Spanish accent curling around each English syllable, gentle and terrible all at once. “You don’t need her. You belong here. Conmigo. I did the papers. Mexico says you’re mine. The world says so too. That’s all.” 

Charity’s mouth worked soundlessly. She wanted to spit venom, How dare you? You filthy immigrant. You nothing. But the words curdled on her tongue because they felt childish now. Empty. She had no ground to stand on, quite literally. 

Instead, a pitiful sound scraped up her throat: “Alejandra… please… I can’t, I can’t be yours, I’m not, I’m—” 

Alejandra exhaled softly, and even her sigh seemed to blow Charity back a fraction. Then, with that same crushing gentleness, she murmured, “Let it sink in, Patrona.” 

And like the flick of a switch, the conversation was over. The giant leaned back, phone reclaimed, leaving Charity alone in the shadow of the chipped coffee mug and the scratchy folds of the hoodie that had become her only refuge. 

A car horn blared somewhere below the apartment window. Pipes rattled in the wall behind her. A neighbor’s TV bled cheap laughter through the drywall. All around her, the pulse of a life she’d never bothered to see, a life she now couldn’t escape, closed in. 

Charity curled down onto her side, clutching a corner of the hoodie’s sleeve like a blanket. Her voice was gone. Her old world was gone. 

And outside the smudged glass, the late morning sun rose higher over a city that no longer cared who Charity Stevens used to be. 

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