Allea

one

My eyelids trembled as I struggled to open my eyes, and soon my whole body started shivering.

I'm afraid to open my eyes and find myself once again in the darkness that kept me trapped but there's also something nagging inside me to bravely accept the reality, the light I met. So what if I'm once again in the darkness, this time I'll certainly find the door and won't lose hope until I succeed.

I won't be weak this time.

As I slowly opened my eyes, the dimmed familiar room came into sight, the same room in which I took my life.

Keeping my trembling at bay, I sat up on the queen size bed I'm lying on and looked around. The lamps on the side tables are illuminating the room softly and the sight is vaguely similar. The royalty-inspired room, the window from which the outside gardens could be seen was hidden behind hideous bulky golden curtains, with an empty golden color couch at its side, ignoring the full-length cheval mirror, I moved my eyes toward the door of the room and sighed.

In later years, I changed the design of this room because I hated it... but why's it similar to what it was prior?

Confused, I extended my hand to open the drawer of the side table to find something familiar but all it's filled with useless things, including magazines and such. When I took one out, my whole body started shivering again as I saw the date on it, and the image of my step-father on the cover with news of his and my mother's plane crash, a week after their death, nine years ago! Rushing toward the mirror, which I first overlooked, I stood in front of it.

Instead of a dejected figure of a girl whose brown eyes were filled with tears, this time showed a young girl with wide eyes staring unbelievingly at her reflection. Soon, tears filled my eyes and I fell on my knees, not believing that I'm staring at my sixteen-year-old self -the time when I started walking on the path of my destruction which I wrote with my own hands.

Thinking of my life, I couldn't help the tears that filled my eyes -my weak & failed self.

I was four when my father left us, me and my mother. In my innocence, I asked my mother the reason for my dad's disappearance, I always considered myself daddy's girl but when my mother told me that he left us because he found someone better than mommy, I was mad at dad. Years later when I saw my biological father with the better woman, I understood it was not her face that was prettier but the money she had and that was also the time when I realized how much of a daddy's girl I was, because, like him, I too only loved money & power.

Growing up life was not difficult, even without my father we were not financially struggling, because my mother was a quite capable woman. Her parents were against my mothers' relationship so she left their home to marry my father but being one of the top graduates from the Ivy league in business & management, it was not hard for her to find a job and support her daughter. She provided me everything she could, but I never considered it enough, there was always a hunger for more and best inside me.

My mother worked as the secretary for Odgen Allgaier. He was a self-made billionaire, an orphan who struggled through life and finally landed a job in one of the leading corporations from where he worked hard and started his small business along with his wife and a friend, with whom he grew up in the foster care. In their happy lives, the day came when everything shattered for them, Odgen Allgaier's wife died of cardiac arrest, their only son was just around five back then.

Odgen Allgaier was a kind and upright man but after his wife's death, he too didn't escape from the clutches of high society women. He loved his late wife dearly and couldn't give her position to anyone but for his son's sake, to give him a motherly figure, he had to find someone. He decided to marry his secretary who worked with him and his wife for eight years, my mother. He thought that only she knows how important his wife was and except for the title of Mrs. Allgaeir, there was nothing much in the marriage.

When he offered my mother this, she hesitated not because she found it troubling but what her daughter would think? I, on the other hand, was elated. I never thought that my dreams would come true this early, how could I let slip the chance of being the daughter of Odgen Allgaier, I could have everything I want, nothing was more important than this, not even my mothers' happiness and what she wanted. Was she even willing to marry a person who'll never consider her his wife in true meanings? I didn't care and just pushed her to marry the wealthy man.

I was fourteen when once again, I had a father but this time a rich one who could give me everything I wanted. A top school in Manhattan, a luxurious room in a mansion to live in, cars, and unlimited money to spend. Odgen Allgaier was a good man and he treated me well because my mother treated his son well. In the two years, I remember not spending time with my mother, I got busy in my elite life and she in the job of helping my step-father in business as his Mrs. and raising his six-year-old son.

And whenever she tried to spend time with me, I was not interested. I was so lost in the shine of this elite world of money that nothing was able to pull me back, not even when after two years of becoming a part of the Allgaier family my mother and Odgen Allgaier died in the crash of their private jet.

I was sixteen and my step-bother, with whom I hardly exchanged any greetings in two years, was eight years old, we both became orphans. I remember crying that day not because my mother died but I was afraid with her death I will lose the life I was living, how shameful and blinded I was.

Fortuitously for us, there was a man whom Odgen Allgaier considered more than his brother, Jackson Hale, he too grew up in the same foster home. In Odgen Allgaier's will, which he created just in case, it was stated that the company and his son's custody will be under Jackson Hale if anything happens to him until his son, Kai Odgen Allgaier, comes of age.

Jackson Hale was truly an honest man but also unfortunate, he was suffering from a brain tumor which was detected a year before his brother-like-friend died and when all responsibility fell on him, he neglected his health, the tumor grew fatal and it only took three years for him to die too, I was nineteen till then.

At the time Jackson came into our lives, he knew his time was unknown and limited, because of Kai, my step-brother's young age, he decided to prepare me until Kai gets old enough. He was good to me and when he told me that I should learn the business to help in it later, I only thought of it as a source of power, never took it seriously. When Jackson died three years later, leaving me as Kai's and Company's representative, I was once again elated.

I became the youngest CEO of billion-dollar Allgaier Corporation, all because of Jackson, he fought for me in front of share-holders to get this position, he knew if not for me, Kai will never be able to inherit his father's company even if he comes of age. He trusted me even if I was not a part of the family in any way, he still thought of me as a better option to secure Kai's inheritance than the hungry wolves of society.

But I was not much different from the same people Jackson wanted Kai to protect from.