I failed my mother and sister, Returned as a Billionaire

CHAPTER 5

“I need to save her at any cost.”

Kevin hurriedly knelt beside his mother and pressed two fingers against the base of her throat where the pulse had gone thin and uneven, barely there at all, like a thread about to snap. 

He closed his eyes. This was the only chance to save his mother, if he couldn't save his mom with the acupuncture then what's the use of learning this method.

 Three years of training under the old man's hands had taught him things no medical school on earth would ever put in a textbook.

He quickly found the pressure points along her neck and spine, the ones his master had made him practice on wooden dummies until his fingers bled, and he pressed them in the exact sequence the old man had drilled into his muscle memory ten thousand times over.

Her breathing was a bit steadied. The trembling in her limbs slowed and then stopped. The color in her lips crawled back from gray to lighter pink. 

This was his hope….

She was not out of danger… not even close…. But she was no longer falling.

"Mom." His voice came out broken in the middle, cracked down the center like a plate dropped on a kitchen floor. "Mom, can you hear me? It's Kevin. I'm right here."

Her eyelids twitched but did not open. A small sound left her throat, thin and dry, the kind of sound a person makes when they have been calling for help so long their voice has worn down to nothing.

He gathered her against his chest and held her the way she used to hold him when he was five years old and burning with fever on the bathroom floor of their one bedroom apartment. 

She would rock him and whisper into his hair and tell him the world was not as scary as it felt, and he believed her every single time because she had never lied to him. Not once. Not ever.

And what had he done with that love? He had handed her to a woman who treated her like garbage left on the curb.

"I did this to you." The words tasted like ash in his mouth. "I chose her. I trusted her. I put you in her hands and I walked into that prison thinking you would be safe, thinking she would take care of you because I loved her and that was supposed to mean something."

His throat closed around the last word and he swallowed against it until he could speak again.

"I was so busy trying to be a good husband that I forgot to be your son first. HOW SELFISH SON I COULD BE."

Kevin pulled off his coat and wrapped it around her body, lifting her from the concrete floor the way a man lifts something holy out of a fire. 

She weighed almost nothing. That was the worst part. She used to be a woman who carried grocery bags up four flights of stairs without stopping, and now she weighed less than the coat he had put around her.

"I'm going to fix this." He pressed his lips against her forehead, and her skin was so hot it burned his mouth. "Every single thing they did to you, Mom. I'm going to punish each of them… And every single person who lets it happen is going to answer for it. That I promise you in my life."

He turned toward the hallway with his mother in his arms.

Tyler Reed was standing in the doorway, blocking it with one arm braced against the frame and a look on his face like a toll booth operator who had caught someone trying to slip through without paying.

"Whoa whoa whoa." Tyler held up his other hand, still holding the game controller. "Where do you think you are going with her, Loser?"

"Move."

"Not so fast, Loser" Tyler's mouth curled into a lazy grin. "That old woman has been eating our food and breathing our air for three years. You think that is free? Somebody owes us compensation. Room and board, medical expenses, emotional damage from having to smell that room every time I walked past it. I am thinking fifty thousand sounds about right. Call it a charity discount for you."

He laughed and waiting for Kevin, being a good obedient dog, would give him the money.

Kevin did not answer him with words. 

He was so angry, after doing this much to him, he dared to ask him for money. 

“THUMPP”!!!

His right foot came up so fast Tyler did not even see it leave the ground. 

The kick caught him square in the chest, and the sound it made was like a thick branch snapping in half. 

Tyler flew backward across the living room, hit the far wall with enough force to crack the plaster behind his shoulders, and slid down to the marble floor with blood already spilling from his mouth.

Mrs. Reed's scream split the air like a siren.

"MY SON!" She threw herself off the couch and scrambled across the floor to where Tyler was crumpled against the wall, gasping and spitting red onto the white tile. "YOU ANIMAL! YOU FILTHY ANIMAL! Look what you did to my boy!"

“AHHHHHHH.” Tyler screamed with pain. 

Kevin kept walking.