Seven words

3: ;-((

"Your parents didn't die in an accident."

"Your parents didn't die in an accident."

"Your parents didn't die in an accident."

No matter which word you placed emphasis on, it still sounded insane. What could those words possibly mean? I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, confusion taking control of my head. The seven words whispered in my ear from last night continuously repeated in my brain, like a broken record. So my parents didn't die? Or maybe they did, and it wasn't an accident. Maybe someone else died in that accident, and I thought that it was my parents.

They had passed away when I was nine, same age as my brother, but we had apparently not had any relatives who wanted to take us in, so we had lived in the orphanage. I had hated the world for months, angry at why our kind, loving parents had been taken from us so cruelly.

By a boat.

Suddenly, my thoughts veered towards the mysterious 'masked man' who had given me this information. What did he know anyway. How did he know this?

Maybe it was a lie.

Could it have been? A lie? But why would anyone purposely want to hurt me like that?

A vibration on my bedside table diverted my attention from the enigma currently placed in front of me.

My phone had been ringing on silent nonstop all day, and, fed up, I decided to finally answer it, and find out who was so desperate to speak to me.

"Hello?" My stressed, tired voice greeted.

A light chuckle came from the phone. "Hangover?" Jace.

"Nah, just confused."

"Why?"

"Because I can't figure out if some information is reliable or not."

"Vague. Mysterious. Hmm. Well, why don't you consult Google? I'm sure it has all the answers."

"Okay. Thanks, Jace."

"No problem."

I fiddled with the necklace I was wearing around my neck as I heaved myself off the bed and walked over to my laptop.

Boating accident 2007 - California

A deluge of news articles flooded the screen.

Clicking on them one-by-one, I skim-read each article, squinting at the screen as I searched for peculiar details.

Californian couple die in boating accident

A man and wife were unfortunately maimed in a boating accident in the Californian waters on Miami beach.

A picture was provided, and I scrutinised it, my eyes raking over each tiny detail of the photograph, until I suddenly spotted it. I was surprised that nobody else had noticed it.

The photo was of a boat, its engine fully visible as it, and two bodies were lying on a bed of sharp rocks. The bodies had been torn limb from limb, as they were gored on the edges of the stone. The reason that they had been assumed to be my parents were that my mother's passport had been found floating in the red-tinted waters of the accident.

However, what nobody had noticed in the picture, was the background. Camouflaged by the swarm of people surrounding the scene, a black van stood, parked in between a red Volvo and a blue Honda. Being bundled into the back, were a couple, held by a couple of men clad in ebony suits, who roughly tossed them into the boot.

One of the people being shoved into the van had turned their head as soon as this picture had been taken, and I immediately recognised it, having stared at her photo for so long all my life.

My mother.

She hadn't died after all. She was...

Alive!