Rehab for SuperVillains (18+)-Chapter 268: Lital - 3

The box became a ritual, as inevitable as the setting sun bleeding into night.

Every evening, after the pudding sales dissolved into failure, they dragged her back.

No tally sufficed, no desperate plea pierced the veil of indifference.

Lital would stagger through the doors, tray clutched like a shield in her quivering grasp, murmuring her meager victories—six cups gone, or nine, or twelve.

Once, in a haze of false hope, she claimed fifteen, her voice cracking as she recounted each phantom sale, fingers tracing invisible coins.

But Matron Gresha needed no truths; she craved only submission, a grinding down of spirit into dust.

"Four," the woman would sneer, her lips curling like withered leaves, eyes boring into Lital’s soul regardless of the evidence.

"You think I don’t spy your tricks? Hiding the rest in the bins like a sneaky rat. Pathetic. Utterly pathetic."

The children erupted in laughter then—not the pure peals of innocence, but a jagged, hesitant chorus that glanced nervously over shoulders, as if fearing the echo might turn on them next.

They weren’t scared of Lital; she was beneath that, a crumpled thing not worth the energy of true malice.

Yet they branded her with names, spat like venom into the air.

"Rotbox."

"Shadow-Lips."

"Bug-Girl."

The words clung to her like burrs, burrowing deep.

She never retorted. Not a whisper, not a glare.

Her silence was her armor, thin and cracking, but all she had left.

She’d trudge back alone, through the kitchen’s fetid steam and out into the desolate yard, feet sinking into the mud that seemed to pull at her ankles like greedy hands.

The box waited, a squat sentinel of despair, its mold-flecked sides glistening under the dying light. Sometimes tears carved hot paths down her cheeks as she approached.

Other times, her eyes were dry as bone—it hinged on the streak of nights already endured.

Four was her record, a blur of agony where dawn found her collapsed, legs numb and useless, pins of fire prickling as blood sluggishly returned.

She adapted, in broken ways.

Curled into the rear corner where the straw mounded thickest, a foul nest softened by rot.

The wood there wept moisture, planks bowing under years of neglect, the floor dipping into a shallow basin where the insects pooled like living shadows.

Sleep evaded her, a cruel phantom; to lie still was to invite invasion, their tiny feet mapping her skin like conquerors claiming territory.

Fear had evolved into grim certainty.

They would come—the beetles with their armored husks, the centipedes undulating like serpents from nightmares.

It was law, etched into the box’s very essence, alongside the suffocating dark and the tomb-like hush.

After the sixth night, her screams withered away, pointless echoes swallowed by indifference.

In their place, she forged a fragile rite.

Counting her fingers.

One, two, three, four, five—

Again and again, lips shaping the numbers in soundless devotion.

Sometimes she’d tap thumb to fingertip, a tactile pulse against the void, a makeshift heartbeat to drown the skittering symphony.

If she faltered—

—they surged closer.

They came regardless.

A centipede traced her belly once, its segmented body rippling over coat buttons with deliberate clicks, each leg a needle-prick of revulsion.

She froze, breath rationed to shallow sips, the sensation blooming into nausea that clawed up her throat, then numbing into a distant hum.

She gnawed her lip raw, copper tang flooding her mouth, a anchor to reality.

In desperation, she waged war.

Smashed three beetles beneath her heel, their innards a slick smear on the plank, a fleeting triumph.

But the next night birthed vengeance—a writhing nest in the straw, dozens hatching from glistening eggs, their blind hunger a mirror to her own despair.

She surrendered then. No more battles.

Instead, she turned to words, fragile bridges into the abyss.

It started with the fissure—a narrow seam in the corner boards, imperfect join where drafts sighed through like spectral breaths.

She christened it Lilly, a name plucked from some buried memory, soft and untainted.

"I hate them, Lilly," she’d murmur, body coiled tight as a spring.

"They crave my screams. It feeds them, like blood to leeches."

The crack offered no reply, just its eternal, whispering wind.

Not at first.

On the ninth night, the air curdled.

The box didn’t shift physically, but the atmosphere thickened, pressing down with an unseen weight, the darkness coiling denser, as if an entity had stirred from slumber and fixed its gaze upon her frailty.

Then—the voice.

A rasp of breath, mirroring her own, wordless at first.

But it lingered, intimate, invasive.

She twisted toward the crack, heart a frantic drum.

"...Lilly?"

The exhalation ceased, a dead pause.

Then.

"They’re in your hair."

Lital stiffened, ice flooding her veins.

Her hands flew to her scalp unbidden, nails raking through tangled curls, dislodging—real or imagined?—the scuttle of legs burrowing at the roots, itching like accusations.

She wept then, muffled sobs not born of terror, but a deeper sorrow: the voice was her own echo, twisted.

Thicker, laced with a serene amusement, as if it observed her unraveling from a throne of shadows.

Watching.

Always watching.

When Matron Gresha wrenched open the door at dawn, sunlight stabbed in like a betrayal.

Lital didn’t flinch, didn’t squint.

She rocked amid the straw, a soft, fractured chuckle bubbling from her lips, aimed at secrets only she perceived.

The Matron’s face twisted in unease, but Lital saw nothing—only the count resuming in her mind.

One, two, three, four, five...

And a final whisper to the crack, her new confidante, her unraveling self.

"See you again."

.

.

.

Dinners vanished like ghosts in the dawn.

At first, it was punishment for her pudding failures, a deliberate withholding that gnawed at her edges.

Then it solidified into habit, an unspoken decree etched into the orphanage’s rhythm.

The staff glided past her during mealtimes, their eyes sliding over her form as if she were a smudge on the wall, unworthy of notice.

Bowls clattered into other hands, steam rising like accusations, while Lital faded into irrelevance.