The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 285: The Girl Who Knew Only Pain

# The Girl Who Learned to Kill

Perhaps you have wondered, after following Eris Igniva through these blood-soaked pages, why a young woman would devote herself so completely to a monster.

Why Mira would serve the Fire Witch with the kind of loyalty usually reserved for saints and saviors.

Why she would endure torture, starvation, the threat of death itself, and never once betray the woman who burned kingdoms to ash.

The answer, as most tragic answers are, is simple.

Because Eris Igniva was the only person who ever looked at Mira and didn’t see a victim.

She saw a survivor.

And sometimes, that makes all the difference.

Mira’s mother died bringing her into the world.

It was a cruel transaction, one life traded for another, and her father never quite forgave the exchange. Oh, he loved his daughter... loved her desperately, in fact, in the fractured way of a man whose heart had been carved out and replaced with grief. He fed her. Clothed her. Taught her letters and numbers and the names of flowers that grew in their small garden.

But he never smiled at her. Not once.

Because every time he looked at Mira’s face, he saw the woman he’d lost. The ghost of a love buried too soon, haunting him through his daughter’s eyes.

Mira was five years old when she found him.

The door to his room had been closed for two days. She’d knocked, called for him, pressed her small hands against the wood and begged him to open it. When silence was her only answer, she’d pushed the door open herself.

He hung from the ceiling beam like a broken puppet, his face gone purple, his eyes bulging and empty. A chair lay toppled beneath him, evidence of his final choice.

She didn’t scream. Didn’t cry. Just stood there, five years old and already understanding that the world was a place where people left you, one way or another.

They buried him next to her mother, as he’d always wanted.

And Mira went to live with distant relatives... her father’s cousin and his wife, along with their son. A boy three years older than her, already soft and cruel in the way of children who’d never known hunger or consequence.

She thought, at first, that this might be better. A family. A home.

She was wrong.

They starved her.

Not enough to kill... that would have raised questions... but enough to keep her weak. Hollow. Easy to control. Meals were privileges to be earned, and Mira never seemed to earn them. A broken plate meant three days without food. A spilled cup meant five. The slightest mistake, the smallest infraction, and her stomach would gnaw itself empty while they ate at the table above her locked room.

The wife beat her with switches and closed fists, her face twisted with a hatred Mira couldn’t understand. What had she done? What crime had she committed simply by existing?

The husband was worse. His hands were heavy and cruel, leaving bruises that bloomed like dark flowers across Mira’s thin arms and ribs. He smiled when he hit her. Called it discipline. Called it correction.

Their son learned from his father’s example.

By the time Mira was eight, she’d stopped crying when they hurt her. Tears only made it worse. Begging only made them laugh.

So she endured. Because the alternative... the streets, the cold, dying alone in some gutter... was somehow more terrifying than the daily brutality of her relatives’ home.

At least here, she had a roof. A floor to sleep on. The distant hope that maybe, someday, things would improve.

They didn’t.

She was nine when her body betrayed her.

The blood came in the night, terrifying and unexplained. She’d woken to find her shift stained, her thighs sticky, and panic had seized her throat. Was she dying? Was this some punishment for sins she couldn’t name?

The wife had found her crying in the washing room, scrubbing uselessly at the fabric.

"Stupid girl," the woman had sneered. "It’s your courses. You’re a woman now." She’d thrown a rag at Mira’s face. "Clean yourself up. And don’t bleed on my floors."

No explanation. No comfort. Just disgust and dismissal.

But the husband had overheard.

And everything changed.

The way he looked at her shifted. Before, his eyes had held contempt, annoyance, the flat indifference one reserves for livestock. Now they held something else. Something that made Mira’s skin crawl and her stomach turn.

Hunger.

The first time he came to her room at night, Mira didn’t understand what was happening until it was already done. She was nine years old. He was a grown man. The math was simple and devastating.

She told the wife the next morning, her voice small and shaking, the words tumbling out like broken glass.

The woman had struck her across the face so hard Mira saw stars.

"Liar," she’d hissed. "Disgusting little liar. You think you can seduce my husband and then play victim? You think I don’t see what you are?"

But she saw. Of course she saw.

She just chose to blame the child instead of the monster she’d married.

The visits continued. Weekly at first, then more frequently. And when the son discovered what was happening... when he walked in one night and found his father in Mira’s room... he didn’t help.

He joined.

Because cruelty, like violence, is learned. Passed down from father to son like a family trade.

It went on for months.

Mira stopped speaking. Stopped thinking about escape or rescue or any future beyond surviving the next night, the next violation, the next moment of pain.

She was ten years old and already dead inside.

But the body, stubborn thing, kept living.

And one evening, as dusk painted the sky in shades of blood and ash, something in her finally, irrevocably broke.

Not broke. Transformed.

She’d hidden the knife earlier that day... a kitchen blade, nothing special, but sharp enough for what needed doing. Waited in her small, locked room with the kind of patience that comes from desperation. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

When the door opened, when the husband stepped inside with that familiar hunger in his eyes, Mira didn’t hesitate.

She drove the blade into his throat.

He made a sound... wet, gurgling, surprised. His hands flew to the wound, blood spilling between his fingers in hot, pulsing streams. He staggered backward, eyes wide with shock and rage and the dawning realization that he was dying.

Mira watched him fall.