REBORN TO LET MY EX CALL ME AUNT

SERENA'S POV

My eyes flew open but I couldn't see through the red mist Fire coursed through my veins, my skin felt too hot, my chest too tight. I sucked in gulps of air, clutching at the silky sheets beneath me.

Soft sheets of bed?

I stopped moving. The last thing I remembered was dying on the filthy and cold floor of the rat infested asylum. I spent five long years in that dark place, completely blind and broken. I remembered the sound of the heavy iron door closing. I remembered my stepsister Giada's mocking laugh echoing down the hall the day she threw me in here.

"Enjoy your new house, sister." I could hear the poison in Giada's voice as she sneered in my memory. "No one is ever going to come looking for you."

"Come on, Giada! Don’t do it! I had begged, crying tears from eyes that no longer saw. "Tell her, Nico! Help me, please!"

My ex-fiance, Nico Moretti, had sneered coldly at me. “Serena, you asked for it. You've ruined my reputation. Take her away and lock her up."

Those cruel words echoed in my ears every single day until my body finally gave up in the dark, alone, with nothing.

But I was not at this moment on a cold stone floor. I was in a luxury hotel room in a king size bed. I raised my shaking hands and looked at them. I could see!  I could see again. My skin was smooth and young, no nasty scars or bruises from the asylum guards. I ran a hand through my hair, touching it. My full, soft, rose-gold hair was back on my shoulders, not chopped off and matted with dirt.

I climbed out of bed, spilling a small glass of water on the nightstand. My eyes were fixed on the glowing digital clock next to the lamp.

"August 10, 2024. No way,” I said out loud, my voice shaking. "August tenth... back I am?"

Here I was again. Back to the worst night of my life. Nico Moretti’s birthday party. The night Giada spiked my champagne glass with the high-grade, illegal drug. The night she laid a trap to destroy my life forever. 

“Drink up, birthday girl’s sister,” Giada had smiled an hour ago downstairs. “A toast to Nico’s big day.”

"Thank you, Giada," my younger, stupid self had said, drinking the whole glass.

The drug was burning through my blood now, trying to mess with my head. I knew what it was that should happen. I was supposed to feel light-headed and stagger down the hall into 1204. In my former life there were three hired men waiting in that room and a dozen paid photographers to take pictures of me in a bad position and ruin my name forever. I had found the trap and run crying for Nico from Room 1204, right into the glare of the paparazzi's flashbulbs.

In my past life, the reporters had shouted, "Look! There she is! Serena Valenti is being unfaithful to Nico!"

That one night undid everything I had. I lost my inheritance, my good name, my freedom. I went completely blind after years of neglect and beatings inside the asylum. Tonight they did this to me and I died in the dark.

“Not this time,” I said to the empty room, grinding my teeth. I will never let you win again.

Heat surged into my brain and my vision blurred. The aphrodisiac was powerful, dragging me into a heavy fog. I needed pain to keep my head clear.

I picked up a heavy glass ashtray from the desk and smashed it hard against the edge of the table. Glass flew over the carpet. I grabbed a shard of glass, something sharp and pointed, and took a deep breath.

Do it, Serena.  I told myself to get up.

I drove the sharp shard into the palm of my hand.

"Ah!" I gasped, biting my lip till it bled.

Warm blood ran down my fingers. But the sharp pain worked instantly. My brain fog cleared. My pulse slowed, my eyes cleared. I grabbed my little party purse from the chair, wrapped my bleeding hand in a cloth napkin and carefully opened the hotel room door to peer out into the hallway.

I looked around. Two men in dark suits stood by the elevators at the end of the corridor.

"Is she coming out yet?" one of them said on a walkie-talkie.

"Not yet," a voice from the radio said. “Watch the elevator. Don't let her off the floor."

I looked right, toward the emergency stairwell. Another guy was leaning against the door to the exit, looking at his phone. Giada never left anything to chance. The elevator was booby-trapped. The stairwell was guarded.

“Where shall I go?" My heart clanged against my ribs and I whispered under my breath. "Serena, think. Think!"

I turned my head and saw a heavy, unmarked mahogany door at the far end of the left-hand hallway, behind a marble pillar.

My eyes were wide open. I knew that door from hotel gossip. It led to the private staircase of the Penthouse Suite.  It was a restricted floor no one in the city dared to visit. It belonged to a dangerous, powerful man everyone feared.

Suddenly I heard heavy steps coming round the corner. It was a bunch of paparazzi, big cameras around their necks.

“Check the rooms on this floor!” a photographer whispered loud enough to his friend. "Giada said she’d be around here somewhere."

"Come on! "I want the first picture!" said the second man.

They were looking at me. I didn't have time to stop. I tiptoed towards the unmarked mahogany door. I reached for the handle but it was tight.

Fuck! I growled.

"Hey!  You hear that?' One of the photographers shouted down the hall. "Look! There's someone by the pillar! Hey you! Stop!"

I quickly tugged a thin metal hair pin from my rose-gold hair. My hands were shaking but my head was laser sharp. I pushed the pin into the keyhole and twisted hard, feeling for the pins inside.

Tap.

The lock was very heavy. I threw open the mahogany door, dived inside and slammed it shut as the photographers rounded the corner. I fired the bolt on the inside just in time."Where did she go?" came a muffled voice from the other side of the heavy wood. "She was just here! "Search the area!"

I pushed back against the door and tried to get my breath back. My chest heaved and fell.

Inside, it was pitch black and freezing cold. The air was like an ice box compared to the warm hotel hallway. I stepped into the dark, trying to get my eyes used to it.

"Hello?" I whispered into the darkness. "Is there anyone here?"

Before I could get my breath back a huge, freezing cold hand like an iron vise closed round my throat.

“Oh God,” I rasped as the mighty force lifted my feet completely off the ground.

A big man slammed me hard against the cold wall. Suddenly in the pitch black room, I saw a pair of glowing golden eyes staring right into mine. Fierce and wild like a hunting beast. 

‘Who are you?’ snarled the man, his voice deep and rough and shaking with rage. “Speak now, or I break your neck!”

His grip on my throat tightened. With my bleeding hand I grabbed his strong wrist, gasping for breath. When I looked into his golden glowing eyes, I saw something strange. His eyes were blown wide and completely unfocused. His entire massive body was shaking uncontrollably against mine, radiating pain and tension. His breath was ragged and shallow.

Before I was reborn, I was a young medical student and I learned about complex neurological symptoms. At this time, I knew exactly what was happening to him. He wasn't just hitting me in anger, he was in the midst of a violent, agonising sensory overload episode. Every light, every sound, every touch was like a knife drawn over his brain.

“Answer me!” he bellowed, voice cracking with pain too terrible to bear. "Who has sent you here?"

I did not struggle against his chest. I knew if I resisted, his sensory attack would get worse. Instead, slowly I raised my right thumb, the one not busy. I was trying to find the exact pressure point behind his earlobe, at the bottom of his skull. It was a particular nerve-releasing method I had learned from a blind, eccentric healer who had lived with me in the asylum during my blackest years.

"Easy..." I whispered, barely getting the words past my lips.

I pressed hard with my thumb on the secret pressure point behind his ear.

The effect was immediate.

The man suddenly gasped. Immediately the pressure on my throat was gone, and I fell back to my feet. His huge body shook with overwhelming relief as I took a deep breath of the cold air. The screaming painful white noise that had been torturing his brain, went silent for the very first time in years.

His knees almost gave way. He fell forward on me, his face pressed deep into the crook of my neck. He was shaking violently, split between deep agony and the sheer relief of the sudden quiet in his head.

We both stood still, in the dark, in the cold room, for a long moment. I didn't move. I let him rest his heavy head on my shoulder, and I held my wounded hand away from his clothes, bleeding.

Then I felt a low, dangerous growl vibrate against my skin. 

“Don't move,” the man growled in my neck, his voice low and menacing. “Don’t move one inch away from me or I’ll kill you.”

I managed a weak smile, my throat still sore from his grip. I leaned my head a little on his dark hair and wheezed back at him. “If you kill me… your headache is back again."

The man hung suspended in the thick silence my words had created. Slowly he dragged his face from my neck and stood upright in his tall frame. In the darkness those sharp golden eyes narrowed, focusing on my face for the first time without any haze of pain.

"Who the hell are you?"