HOW YOU LIKE THAT | JENLISA

Chapter 57

Jennie

I couldn't get much sleep that night as I kept tossing and turning in bed. My mind was preoccupied with what I would find in the journal that Bambam had given me.

Early in the morning, when Lisa was still asleep, I climbed out of bed and picked up the journal that I'd kept hidden. The maids wouldn't come to disturb me for at least another hour, and Lisa was snoring softly. I knew that she wouldn't wake up as long as I stayed beside her. If she found me gone from bed, she would wake up and cause a racket.

I'd gone for an early morning walk in the courtyard last week, making sure that Lisa was still sleeping, but thirty minutes later, when I came back inside the mansion, she was screaming and running around throwing the doors open, looking for me.

After that day, I knew not to sneak out. She constantly sought physical contact and finding the bedside empty made her very upset.

She draped her arm over my waist. I traced my fingers over her biceps as I opened the journal to read. The journal was ancient since it was being passed down from generations, and the pages in the beginning were filled with entries by different ancestors of the Manoban family.

Mostly by the firstborn member of the Manoban family. Did that mean Lisa had written something in here too?

Bambam had specifically advised me to read the dog-eared pages because he said the other entries were irrelevant. Looking at the first few entries, I realised that he wasn't joking when he said that it would bore the hell out of me. There wasn't anything interesting that the ancestors had written in those pages.

So I skipped to the middle pages of the journal.

Grace Manoban.

I tried to recall if I had heard of that name before.

Was this Lisa's mother?

I started reading from the first page, but the pages were all detailing about school life, and college, and the other not-so-important events in her life. I skimmed some more pages until I found the juicy parts. The page had a small red star scrawled on it with a pen.

I don't know long I've been in this bed, thinking about ending this madness that runs in my family.

My father wouldn't listen to me.

Innocent lives have been sacrificed; people have died for some sadistic rituals. I needed for my dad to stop. I needed for him to understand that this wasn't how I wanted life to go on.

Sometimes I wish that I could just run away, far from here. Sometimes when I sit by the lake and stare into the water, wishing that I had the guts to jump into it. The blue, and serene water calms me down somehow. It feels like a soothing balm to my loneliness.

If I jumped into the lake, it would all end then, wouldn't it?

The pain and the sufferings would be gone.

But I was a coward and I couldn't bring myself to commit suicide.

Dad wanted me to get married soon, as I was turning twenty-five, but I didn't want to as I knew the man that my father had chosen to marry me.

Mark Jung was nice, sweet, intelligent, and kind. He made me smile, and his family was as influential as ours is. I went on a few dates with Mark, just to make my father happy. I liked Mark, but that spark was missing. He didn't make my insides turn to molten; he didn't make me laugh until I had tears in my eyes, and he wasn't as handsome as a movie star.

Chris was all those things. And more.

It's too bad Chris was born on the wrong side of the blanket.

The wrong side of the town.

He was a stable boy on the Manoban estate.

The sounds of loud thumping of footsteps made me shut the journal quickly and hide it beneath my pillow. A soft knock on the door broke into the silence.

"Come in."

Jessi stepped inside the room. She bowed, with her eyes never straying from Lisa's half-naked form on the bed or her hand holding me, crushing me possessively against her. I bet she was used to walking into far more compromising situations of her other employers, so she wasn't bothered with a married couple still lounging in bed.

"Good morning, Mrs. Manoban. Master Manoban has asked for you and Ms. Manoban to be ready in twenty-minutes. He said that you were going with him to the head office."

I sighed. I'd completely forgotten about the board meeting that the prick wanted me to attend.

I gave her a nod. "Tell him that we'll be ready. Also, please send in the breakfast."

She bowed once again and left.

I wasn't interested in going for this stupid board meeting. I'd rather be cooped up in this bedroom to read the journal. There were so many secrets still waiting to be uncovered, so many lies that the Manoban family had spewed. I needed every bit of information. Knowledge is power after all, and I was going to dig deeper and find out what was going on, starting from the family history.

I turned to Lisa and kissed her collar-bone. "Time to wake up, baby."

She squeezed my body towards her, while mumbling something in her sleep. I traced the back of her face with my fingers. "Lisa, baby, we need to get ready."