Rust Upon the SoulChapter 1
Angelo’s ideal woman, Maria Rossi, had finally returned to the world after being away from her seclusion in the Catholic church.
To show how sorry he was to her, he shaved off all my hair, burned away my scars and gave her the title of the new ‘pure’ woman.
But the ideal woman thought her body didn’t look special enough anymore. She believed that regular statues couldn’t match her perfect image. So, she ordered people to kidnap my five-year-old son and seal him inside a statue made from mud, hoping that her beauty would return to her.
I ran for ten kilometers through the mountains. I dug through a hundred statues with my bare hands before I finally found my son, who was barely alive.
I fell to my knees, hitting my head on the ground again and again, begging Angelo to save our son.
But instead of helping me, he pushed my grandmother into the mud pond and covered it with a heavy iron net.
“Mrs. Dolores Heron,” he called my poor grandmother coldly,
He then continued, “If you hadn’t killed Maria’s family, she never would’ve seen through the pain of the world, become a nun and suffered in a monastery like that!”
“Sophia, Maria chose your son to be a statue to rever her beauty. he should feel honored. And since you feel so sorry, I’ll use your grandmother to make another statue of Maria!”
He told the bodyguards to hold me down and not help anyone. Then he gently hugged the ideal woman and softly sang to her unborn baby.
With all my strength, I pulled the iron net apart with my hands and held my son and my grandmother, who had already died.
I knelt in front of Mrs. Lombardi and said, “The five-year agreement is over. It’s time for me to go.”
——
The bodyguards kept pushing me down again and again, but I got back up each time, trying to save my family. They didn’t let go of me until my grandmother stopped moving and the surface of the mud pond became still again.
The clay workers standing nearby watched it all with pity in their eyes.
“What a terrible sin,” one of them whispered.
“How can you use a living person to make a statue? Aren’t they afraid of being punished by God?”
“Quiet,” another warned.
“For the sake of his ideal woman, Mr. Lombardi takes blood from the child’s heart every day. He says it helps calm his baby with the woman and gives her peace.”