Dried Lilies, Withered Hearts And A Lonely Path

•Chapter-5• D-day.

Khushi could feel herself being dragged on the cold, hard, and dirty floor. The pebbles poking and scratching her skin,  her clothes not at all protecting her from the power of friction.

"Aaah," 

Even her screams for help escaped in whimpers and grunts. So, extreme was the pain she was feeling. From the soul-sucking pain on her shoulder to the force with she was dragged with her nails broken in odd-shapes and bleeding from her tries to hold onto something.

But everything seemed futile, nothing helped. She didn't even know why she was being dragged like this? What wrong has she committed? 

She gasped when the pressure on her leg was suddenly increased and she was flung to the side hard.  For a few minutes, she was airborne before crashing hard against a solid object that made a clang side.

She screamed

When she fell, not even certain where she was, Khushi took a deep breath and coughed. It pained, got everything was paining so much. Her vision was blurry and her hearing muffled. And she was cold. So cold.

It felt like she was dying. Slowly her life force draining out of her. The pain was unbearable. She has never been in so much pain.

A chilling female cackling drew her out of her painfilled haze.

"This is such a happiness-inducing moment. Aah!! I can't explain how satisfactory it is to watch her whimper so painfully lying beside a trash can, "

The familiar female voice laughed proving her words. How can someone relish in someone else's pain? Khushi didn't know but she did squint her eyes to see who was this woman laughing at her misery?

Thunder cracked and lightning flashed over-head as her blurry gaze finally noticed the people standing around her in a semi-circle. People illuminated by the purplish light of lightening before it was dark and stormy again. Five men, two women, and she knew just three people out of them.

There was Dadi laughing at her broken condition with satisfaction at her face.

Sheetal with poise and perfected aversion directed towards her broken form.

Shyam with his lustful eyes, unclothing her with his gaze and that terrifying smirk. The other four men spotted similar looks and she was in too much pain to think rationally yet a whisper of "why" escaped her lips.

Why does dadi hate her so much?

Why were they hurting her?

Why she was here?

What did she ever do to them?

What do they want with her?

There were infinite "why's" roaming in her mind and only a single syllable escaping her lips.

"Why?"

The evil cackle around her stopped with Dadi's furious snarl and Khushi again wondered what exactly did she do wrong to this woman?

"Well apart of being Rajshree's daughter nothing much, "

There was a sneer directed to her towards the end of that statement and her hazy with pain brain wondered what did her mother do to spite dadi? Khushi didn't know her own mother well enough to guess what she might have done? She was just a twelve-month old child when her mother said goodbye to this world.

Her adopted mother, Who is also her maternal aunt hated any talk about her mother. All she knows about her birth parents are their names and how they died; it was a fire accident according to her aunt.