Never Force Her To Speak

Born with a jinxed tongue, Rory learned early that whatever dark thing she spoke came to pass. When the billionaire industrialist Charles Charles and his wife bring their long-lost biological daughter home, Rory seals her lips, vowing never to speak again, to protect the fragile warmth of a family that searched the country for her.

That silence is tested when her adoptive sister Delilah hurls herself through a glass window and lets their mother and father blame Rory, who is made to kneel all night in the rain. Delilah whispers that she paid eighty-eight thousand dollars to forge a medical report and that she has no heart condition, while Beckett rips away the jade amulet their mother had sought for Rory and gives it to Delilah.

Cornered and stripped of everything, Rory finally speaks a single warning to Delilah, and the girl's faked agony turns real. For it, her father orders her locked in the basement.