Spoiled By My Brothers: Return of The Lost Heiress

Chapter 173: Those Hopeful Eyes Were Now Dead!

The mud on Lucien’s trousers had dried by the time his mother’s voice broke the quiet of the yard.

"Lucien, what are you doing in the dirty mud?" His mother almost screamed, her eyes wide with genuine shock. Her clean-freak son, who usually hated being touched and detested kids, was sitting there completely nonchalantly in the dirt.

He didn’t stand up right away. He stayed right there on his knees, staring at the little girl... at Seraphina, as she carefully guarded the small stick he’d abandoned in the soil. She didn’t even flinch or look up when the sharp click of his mother’s heels hit the gravel.

"Lucien? Heavens, what are you doing out here? Look at your clothes."

His mother stopped a few steps back, her nose wrinkling in disgust as she glanced at the surroundings. She didn’t actually look at Seraphina’s face. She looked through her, the exact same way she looked at a piece of furniture that she needed to discard.

"The director is looking for you," his mother said in a stern tone. "The photographer from the Chronicle needs one last family shot by the gates. Stand up, darling. Your father is getting impatient."

’What the hell!’ Lucien cursed under his breath as he slowly rose to his feet. They had a dead son, a broken home, and yet a front-page picture was what mattered most to them.

He didn’t look at his mother. Instead, his eyes went back to Seraphina, who was watching him. Her thumbs were tucked into the pockets of her oversized, stained apron, her chest rising and falling in those shallow, careful breaths. She didn’t say goodbye, nor did she asked him to stay. She just looked at him.

"I’m coming," Lucien muttered.

As he turned to follow his mother, his fingers brushed against the dried mud still clinging to his palm. He didn’t look back, but he could feel a pair of eyes still burning into his spine.

The eyes that Lucien never forgot.

In the following months, he always wanted to go back and meet her. He wanted to sit in that dirt again and share the things he could never tell anyone else—the suffocating acceptation of his father, and the loneliness he felt after his brother was gone.

But he always stopped himself from reaching her out.

Because the reality of her world was too harsh. Whenever he accompanied his mother on her to the orphanage, he would slip away to find her, only to witness what happened when the adults weren’t looking.

He found out she was constantly bullied by the other kids. They mockingly copied her stutter, pushed her around, and threw her meager belongings into the mud.

And because of his family’s status, he couldn’t just intervene without drawing attention that would only make her a bigger target after he left.

Then, her only friend in that miserable place, a little girl named Emma, was suddenly brought back by her biological parents. Lucien had watched from the corridor as Emma was led out the front doors, leaving Seraphina standing by the window entirely alone, with tears streaming down her face.

The sight made something shatter in him. He wanted to take her out of that orphanage himself. He began looking into private boarding schools, trying to find a way to use his own trust fund to send her somewhere better... where she would be protected and well fed.

But before he could pull the strings or even say a proper word to her, his father found out about the cause of his distraction. Within a week, Lucien’s fate was decided.

He was forced to pack up and sent abroad to a strict university in London for his further studies.

He started a completely new life in London, and with new responsibilities, the memory of the little girl slowly and gradually began to fade.

But the moment he finally came back to the city, everything changed.

His heart felt empty for some reason and he started desperately looking for her.

He might have managed to push her to the back of his mind while he was miles away, but those teary eyes had never stopped haunting him. Every time he closed his eyes in the dark, he saw her standing by that window after Emma left, crying but not uttering a single word.

He felt extremely guilty that he could do anything for her, for being weak, and guilty for not being able to save her when she needed it most.

So, the first thing he did upon his return was search for her.

He hired investigators, checked old city records, and even went back to the orphanage himself, but she had vanished in thin air.

Unknowingly, his heart had become full of her and her alone. She had become his silent obsession, like a missing piece in his life.

Nothing had been the same for him.

When he was in London, he always thought that he’d be able to meet her since only after turning eighteen was she allowed to leave the orphanage, but who would have thought that she was not there anymore, and the old dean who had deeply cared for her had retired, and God knows where she went?

No matter how many times he tried to move on and date, or how serious his relationships were, he couldn’t forget her.

Women from prominent families came and went, but none of them could hold his attention

He had almost given up hope, resigning himself to the fact that he might never see her again.

Until he walked into old Madam Lancaster’s birthday banquet, and those exact same eyes locked onto his from across the crowded ballroom.

He felt a surge of happiness. He wanted to see her and talk to her, but she was not the same anymore. Those eyes, even though they were teary but hopeful, now looked dead, as if no life were left in them.

"What have you been through in these few years?" He muttered as he followed every moment of that girl.