The True Heiress's Revenge: Exposing My Toxic Family on Live TV novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Door
Demi kicks open the door her family is screaming through, slaps and knees her brothers, and says what she wants in front of them all: out of her contract.
"Demi, stop hiding in there and open this door right now!"
Her mother's voice came through the wood, loud and shrill.
"You are going on that survival show, or the Pellham family is finished with you!"
Demi sat on the edge of the bed with her hands on her knees.
She did not move.
She knew every word that was coming next.
She had heard them once before, on this same morning, in this same room.
Then she had died.
That first time, she had gone on the show on her knees.
She had cooked for her brothers and carried their packs and smiled at the cameras, sure that if she worked hard enough, this family would finally keep her.
She had come home hungry for a mother, and found a house that already had a daughter.
Celia Pellham had taken her bed and her place at the dinner table, and she cried beautifully and was never wrong.
The show had been Celia's trap from the first day.
By the last day, Demi was a joke to forty million strangers.
Her brothers broke her leg in the back room and told her to crawl out of their sight.
The brother she had once saved from the men who took her kicked her hand off his trouser leg.
She bled out on a cold floor, and her family called it suicide.
Her hatred was too heavy to leave behind.
A voice she came to call the System offered her a deal: finish missions in a thousand worlds, and live again.
She finished them all.
She came back this morning, in the same bed, with a thousand worlds in her hands.
"Demi! I am counting to three!"
Her mother's fist hit the door.
Demi stood, slid her phone into her back pocket, and kicked.
The door burst off its upper hinge and the frame cracked down the middle.
Four people in the hallway jumped back.
There was her mother, and her eldest brother Quinton in a pressed suit.
There was her second brother Dean, famous and furious, and Celia in a pink cardigan with her eyes already wet.
Demi put her hands in her pockets and looked at them one by one.
"Demi, I am telling you, you have no choice," Dean began. "You will do this show, and you will do exactly what Quinton says, and you will..."
She slapped him.
The sound cracked down the hall.
Dean put a hand to his cheek.
"You hit me?"
"I did," Demi said. "Keep talking and I will do it again."
Quinton stepped in and reached for her arm.
"You shoved Celia down the stairs last week," he said. "She twisted her ankle. How dare you..."
Demi drove her knee into his groin.
Quinton folded in half without a sound.
His face went gray and he gripped the doorframe with both hands.
"The hallway camera caught exactly how that ankle got twisted," Demi said, calm and clear. "You watched the whole thing, Quinton."
Quinton's head came up.
"What a shame the file was deleted off the house server this morning."
Celia's eyes jumped to Quinton.
For one second her mouth stopped trembling.
Then she hummed four low notes under her breath, the way she did when she was nervous, and the tears came back.
Her mother ran to Quinton and held him up.
"Honey, do you need a hospital?"
She was frantic.
She had never once looked that frightened for the daughter she had bled and waited for.
Celia dropped to her knees at Demi's feet and caught her hand.
"Demi, please," she sobbed. "I know you're angry. Hit me instead. I would take it for this family."
"Just don't hate them, please. They care about you more than you know."
Demi raised her hand.
Her mother threw herself between them and wrapped both arms around Celia.
"If you touch her again, I will cancel your welcome dinner tomorrow!" she shouted. "And I will never accept you as my daughter!"
In the last life, that dinner had been everything Demi wanted.
It was the first time anyone said the word family and meant her.
Now the dinner was a closed door she had no wish to walk through.
"Cancel it," Demi said, and smiled. "I only ever came to be useful."
Her mother stared at her.
"You never raised me. Every meal I made this month was charity, and I am done giving it away."
Back then, she had made Quinton soup at midnight for his stomach.
She had done Dean's assistant's job for nothing, twenty-four hours a day.
When Dean's fans doxxed her and shoved her on a sidewalk, he had never once said she was his sister.
"The truth will speak for itself," he had told her.
Demi was finished waiting for the truth.
Quinton straightened, his voice low and hard.
"Think carefully. You are under contract to Pellham Talent. If you refuse this show, I will sue you for breach, and the damages will bury you."
He thought she would fold.
He thought a little fear and a little reward later would put her back in line.
She was his sister, after all, and a suit would be a scandal.
Demi met his eyes.
"I will go on the show," she said. "On one condition."
A small, satisfied smile touched Quinton's mouth.
"Name it."
Demi looked at the man who had once stood and watched her die.
"I want out of my contract."
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