LOGINMy eyes fluttered open to the sound of beeping machines. I squinted looking around but Lucas was nowhere to be found.
I tried speaking but my throat was charred and I gently pushed myself off the bed reaching for the glass of water as I walked towards the door my feet meeting the cold floor. "Lucas?" I called softly as I reached the hallway of hospital. I couldn’t see him but I deluded myself that maybe he went to get something for me. I walked past a few rooms and past nurses who didn’t bother to look at me twice. Then I heard his voice. Low. Soft. Caring. It came from the last door on this hallway and I hastened my steps walking towards the door. I reached the door which was slightly open so I could see everything going inside. Lucas stood beside Selena his hands in her hair as she laid on her bed with a soft smile on her face. "You need rest" he said as he gently played with her hair like she would break if he applied a little more force. Selena nodded at him her eyes glossy as she looked around the room,her eyes moved an they landed on me. Immediately our eyes met she let out a frightened scream, her eyes widened and her body began to shake rapidly. “No.” She whispered looking at me then at her shaky hands like they belonged to someone else. I watched her frightened state confused as to what was happening. “Selena what is it?” Lucas questioned still confused as to why she was looking so scared. “Why is she here!!” Selena yelled pointing at me. Sereia?” Lucas inquired seemingly as confused as I was. Selena didn’t answer instead she started crying. Not quietly. Not softly. She shielded her face with her hands as her shoulders shook,as she cried fervently. A nurse ran in looking worried. “Is everything ok?” "She's here," Selena sobbed. My heart dropped. “Who’s here” The nurse questioned She shook her head wildly. "Why is she here?" she cried. "Why would you let her come here?" "I recognized her voice," Selena said through her tears. "Even when they covered my eyes. I knew it was her." Now people had gathered as Selena spoke in riddles and the people stared at her most of them as confused as I was. "What are you saying?" I whispered. “She did it!” Sereia cried louder this time. “Sereia planned my kidnapping. The entire hallway went silent. “She wanted you Lucas so she kidnapped me to take my place” Selena added as she pulled Lucas’ shirt.. He turned to me his twisted into a sneer.. I shook my head tears already clouding my vision. “She is lying I would never.” “Selena tell him it’s a lie.” I begged walking toward her.. She shrank back against her bed as she screamed. "Don't come closer!" Lucas stood between us shielding her like I was a villain. "Sereia," he said sharply. "Enough!!" I looked at him. "You know me," I whispered. "You know I would never…" "She's terrified," he cut in. "Can't you see that?" Selena sobbed harder as she pressed her head against Lucas’s back. “Calm down Selena ," he said gently as he held her hands. "Are you sure about this?" "I mean..." He hesitated. His eyes moved towards mind for half a second. "She gave you blood." The words hit me first. Then Selena froze as she pulled away from him abruptly. "What?" she screamed, her voice sharp with shock. "She gave me blood?" She stared at Lucas like she hadn't heard him right. "You let her?" Selena cried. "You let her blood enter me?" Her hands started shaking. "I woke up and my kidnapper is somehow keeping me alive?" she screamed. "How could you do that to me?" The hallway erupted in murmurs "She's disgusting." "That's sick." "She planned her own sisters kidnap." The voices got more cruel and I took a step back. "I saved you," I whispered. Selena shook her head violently. "You didn’t want to get caught," she cried. Phones were everywhere now recording everything and probably being posted. "She's lying," someone muttered. "Poor Selena." "Her sister is dangerous." Lucas didn't look at me again. He wrapped his arm around Selena as she cried into his chest. I couldn’t take it anymore my chest tightened and the hallway felt smaller as I took a few steps back then I turned around an sprinted out of the room,the tiny murmurs followed me outside. "Is that her?" "That's the sister." "She looks fine for someone who tried to kill someone." I lowered my head and ran faster as my eyes burned with unshed tears. My legs felt like putty, but I didn't stop. I just kept running past the nurses, past the rooms, past the place where my life had just fallen apart. I pushed through the hospital doors and stumbled outside, the cold air hitting my face like a slap and as I reached the parking lot my body finally gave up. I fell to the ground my hands on my knees as I gasped for air, my chest rising and falling rapidly. I pressed my hand to my mouth to keep myself from making a sound. Why was this happening to me? Why did she have to lie? All this thought ran through my head followed by the familiar ding of my phone. I wiped the snot from my nose with the sleeve of my coat and as I brought out my phone. Notifications filled my screens LIVE NOW. “Selena Fontaine speaks out.” “Missing supermodel shares her story.” “Selena Fontaine is back on our screens.” My fingers shook as I tapped on my phone an Selena’s face filled the rectangular screen immediately. She sat on her hospital bed with Lucas beside her,her face was drained of color and her eyes were sunken and I almost even believed her theatrics. She let out a small cough that earned her series of coos before she began to speak with a trembling voice.. “I don’t want people to misunderstand my sister.” She said softly and I froze.. Did she finally decide not to lie? “Maybe i overreacted by yelling but anyone in my place would have done the same” Comments flooded the screen. “She's so kind.” “Even now she's protecting her.” “An angel.” Selena sniffed and wiped her eyes. "She's always been emotional," she said. "She loved Lucas…maybe too much." My stomach twisted. “My sister hurt me but like they say all is fair in love and war right?” Selena added with a weak laugh. “I have been traumatized deeply,I have lost five years of my life and all this could have been avoided if my sister had just told me she wanted my future husband” Selena added her voice saccharine sweet and I tried convincing myself that my sister wasn’t setting me up for drags. "But instead," Selena added gently, "things went too far." She wiped her eyes as she continued. "I was scared, I really thought I was going to die." The comments exploded once again. “How can her sister be so cruel?” “She doesn't deserve her forgiveness.” “#Protectselena.” Selena took a shaky breath. "I don't want revenge," she said. "I just want peace.” She turned slightly, like she was gathering courage. "So I have one request." My heart dropped. What more could she want? My head? "I want my sister to divorce Lucas," Selena said. The world went quiet around me. "He was meant to be my husband," she continued softly. "She took him and I want him back.” Lucas looked down at her, his jaw tight. "I'm not asking for anything else," Selena said. "Just the peace of knowing I will die married to the man I love ." The live ended as soon as she said that and I could only stare at my dark screen. "She always gets everything," I whispered. And getting Lucas would be no different. When she wanted a dress, she got two. Whenever I wanted something, I was told to wait. I kept my head between my knees as I cried till my throat began to hurt. I didn't know how long I sat there. The sky darkened and the air grew colder. After some time I stood up and I decided to return back home, I walked back and as I reached. The lights were on which was a strange occurrence,which could only mean one thing. Lucas was home. Would he really leave me? I stood in front of the door staring at the handle,my breath coming out shakily as I opened the door. Lucas stood in the living room. In his hands was a folder White. Clean. Official. With the words I dreaded the most boldly written on it..DIVORCE!!!EPILOGUE- SEREIAOne year later, the cliffs of Santorini dropped straight into a sea so blue it looked unreal, and Valerian had bought out the entire stretch for the day — a private clifftop estate normally reserved for heads of state, white canopies lining a path carved into the rock, rose petals scattered the length of it.“You ready, child?” Gracie asked, gripping my hand like she was the one getting married.“I’ve been ready for a year.”She laughed, already crying. “Then go get him.”The quartet shifted into something slower, strings rising over the sound of waves below, and I walked.Valerian stood waiting at the end of the path, dark suit, no tie, his hair slightly windblown. He looked at me like the sea and the hundred guests behind us had simply ceased to exist.“You’re beautiful,” he said when I reached him.“You say that every time.”“Because it’s true every time.”The officiant’s words blurred past until I heard the part that mattered. “Do you, Valerian, take Sereia to be
VALERIANThree weeks had passed since the shooting.Three weeks of white walls and beeping machines and the particular smell of antiseptic that I’d started to taste in the back of my throat even when I wasn’t in the building anymore. Three weeks of sitting in the same plastic chair, holding the same hand, memorizing every line of the same still face. Three weeks of waiting for her eyes to open.I hadn’t left the hospital once.Gracie brought me food I mostly didn’t eat. Sarah brought clean clothes I changed into without really registering it. Liyana came every afternoon straight from school, climbing up beside the bed to take her mother’s hand in both of hers, voice gone soft and careful in a way no five-year-old should have to learn. “Mommy, wake up. I miss you.”But Sereia didn’t wake up.Today, Gracie finally put her foot down.“Valerian.” She planted herself in the doorway like she meant to physically block it. “You need to go home. A few hours. Shower. Sleep in an actual bed. E
VALERIANThe gunshot cracked through the cabin like something splitting in half, and I felt it before I understood it — my whole body going rigid even with my fist still buried in Lucas’s jaw.I looked up. Sereia was already falling. Selena stood over her, the gun still smoking in her hand, and for half a second the room just stopped — Marcus already surging toward Selena, Annabelle screaming somewhere on the floor with blood soaking through her sleeve — but none of it registered. There was only Sereia, dropping to her knees in slow motion that felt like it would never end.Blood was already spreading dark across her dress. Her eyes were open, but something in them had gone distant, unfocused, like she was looking at me from somewhere far away.“Sereia!”I shoved Lucas off me without thinking. He hit the floor and didn’t move again. I didn’t care. I was already across the room, dropping down beside her, my hands finding her shoulders.“Sereia. Look at me! Loom at me.”Her eyes found
SEREIAThe cabin sat dead quiet in the dark — too quiet, the kind of quiet that made every small sound feel like a threat.I stood just behind Valerian, my pulse hammering so hard I could hear it in my own ears, drowning out the wind moving through the trees. Lucas stood on the porch like he owned the night. He had Liyana’s rabbit dangling loose from one hand — her purple rabbit, the one she dragged everywhere, the one she couldn’t sleep without.“Where is she?” Valerian’s voice came out flat. Ice over something boiling underneath.Lucas only smiled. “Safe. For now.”Every cell in my body wanted to lunge at him, claw the smile right off his face. My legs wouldn’t move, fear had me rooted in place like roots had grown through my feet.“She’s inside,” Lucas went on, almost conversational. “Sleeping, finally she cried a good for a good while and she kept calling for you two.” His eyes slid to me. “Almost broke my heart, Sereia. Almost.”“Give her back.”“Not yet.” He flicked the rabbit
SEREIAThe house felt like it was holding its breath.I sat on the couch with my hands pressed between my knees, eyes locked on the front door, and every creak of the old wood made me jolt upright. Every shifting shadow across the wall made some stupid, desperate part of me think there, she’s there — and every time it wasn’t, the hollow place under my ribs widened a little more.Marcus had been gone twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of nothing. Twenty minutes where the only sound in the room was Valerian’s shoes against the floorboards.Gracie had retreated to the kitchen, where I could hear her filling a kettle no one was going to drink from. Sarah stood near the window, phone pressed to her ear, murmuring something low and urgent to someone I couldn’t identify. And Valerian just kept walking — six feet one way, turn, six feet back — like if he stopped moving his body might do something worse.“Valerian,” I said.He didn’t slow down.“Valerian.”That one landed. He spun toward me, eye
SEREIAThe garden was still glowing when I understood my daughter was gone.Fairy lights swayed overhead like nothing had changed. The band kept playing something soft and unbothered. Somewhere behind me, glasses clinked, someone laughed too loud at a joke I’d never hear, and the whole party just kept moving, oblivious, while the ground had opened up under me.“Liyana!” The sound that came out of me didn’t feel like my own voice. “Liyana, baby, where are you?”Nothing answered. Just the band. Just the laughter. Just a silence shaped exactly like the place her voice should have filled.“Sereia.” Valerian’s hand closed around my arm. “Where did she go?”“I don’t know. She was right there.” My throat had started closing on the words. “Playing with the other kids. She was right there, Valerian.”Sarah appeared at my shoulder, all the color gone from her face. “I turned around for one second. One second, Sereia, I was taking a picture and then—”“It’s not your fault.” I pulled free of both
SEREIAMy knuckles were wrapped tightly around the steering wheel and every headlight I sighted through the rear view mirror was suddenly Lucas and every innocent van that passed by was a reporter.I kept looking over my shoulder my neck aching from the multiple times that my neck had twisted.I co
SEREIA“Mommy, my hair won't listen." Liyana complained and her small voice pulled me out of my thoughts."Sorry, baby," I murmured as i brushed her curls gently my mind running with a thousand thoughts."Will Mr. Puzzle be there for breakfast?" Liyana asked, as she wiggled on the small stool."I d
SEREIA The word liability rung repeatedly in my head as I watched Sarah who was waiting at the door of Valerian’s office.I had stood up from my desk and stood in front of his door, watching him lean back in his chair, looking calm like his staff didn’t just call a meeting. His eyes which were co
SEREIA The car pulled away from Nethrix as Arthur drove, his eyes fixed directly on the road. I sat in the back clenching my fists in my lap as the word echoed in my head.Liability.I stared at the window till the city began to blur because of the tears clouding my eyes. The first tear fell hot a







