The harsh reality of Dr. Theron's diagnosis hung in the air between them, a poison with no antidote. Sera sat on the cold hospital floor, the world a blurry, meaningless haze of polished linoleum and muted fluorescent light. Kaelen was alive. The words should have been a triumphant chorus, a final victory. Instead, they were the prologue to a new, crueler tragedy. The woman she loved was a prisoner in her own mind, her soul exiled from the present, trapped behind a wall of trauma nine years thick.
"What do we do?" Sera's voice was a raw, broken whisper, swallowed by the vast, uncaring silence of the hallway. She felt impossibly small, a ghost haunting the edges of a catastrophe she couldn't fix. "How do we... fix this? How can we bring her back?"
Dr. Theron knelt beside her, his movements slow and deliberate, his expression etched with a deep, professional sorrow that went beyond simple patient care. "We can't think of it as 'fixing,' Sera," he said, his voice a low, calming murmur. "Her mind is not a broken machine; it's a fortress under siege. What it has done is an extreme, but logical, act of self-preservation. Think of her psyche as a city. The recent trauma—the explosion, the fire, the near-death experience—was an invading army so terrible that the city sealed its main gates and retreated to the oldest, strongest part of the castle keep. Her seventeen-year-old self is that keep."
He paused, letting the analogy sink in. "We can't just blast open the gates. Forcing the memories back, showing her everything she has walled off at once, could cause the entire fortress to crumble. A complete psychotic break. We have to coax her out. We have to prove the world outside is safe."
Sera looked up, her eyes wide with a new kind of horror, seizing on the one fatal flaw in his logic. "But the world isn't safe, Doctor. The first thing she'll learn is that her mother is dead. She just woke up in a broken body, surrounded by strangers, and you want to tell her that the one person she's desperately looking for is gone? The shock will kill her."
"The shock will be immense," he conceded, his gaze unwavering. "But prolonging the delusion is a far greater danger. We can't lie to her. We can't build a fantasy world around this hospital bed. The longer she lives in that keep, the more she'll believe it's the only reality. The schism could become permanent. She needs to be told, Sera. And it needs to be soon." He placed a gentle hand on her arm. "It cannot come from a stranger, and it cannot come from someone her mind currently perceives as a distant classmate." His eyes were filled with a profound pity. "It has to come from family. Someone she knows and trusts from that time. Is there anyone?"
The name was immediate, unwelcome, but unavoidable. It felt like swallowing glass. "Her sister," Sera said, her voice flat with resignation. "Lilith."
Making the call was an exercise in surreal torment. Sera stood in the sterile consultation room, the phone feeling like a fifty-pound weight in her trembling hand. Lilith answered on the second ring, her voice a clipped, efficient, "Yes?"
Sera's own voice was a stumbling, disjointed mess. "Lilith... it's Sera. She's awake. Kaelen is awake."
A sharp intake of breath on the other end. "Is she alright? What are the doctors saying?"
"She... there's a problem," Sera stammered, struggling to find the words. "She doesn't... remember. Anything. She thinks the fire on the yacht was the Vesper gala fire. The one from nine years ago."
There was a long, heavy silence on the other end of the line, a void so complete that Sera thought she might have been disconnected.
"Define 'thinks'," Lilith's voice finally cut through, sharp as a scalpel.
"She believes she's eighteen," Sera clarified, the words tasting like ash. "She asked for your mother."
Another silence, this one heavier, colder. Sera could almost feel the chill radiating through the phone. "I'm on my way," Lilith said, her voice devoid of all emotion, and hung up.
An hour later, Lilith swept into the hospital waiting area. She was a vision of sharp, black-and-gray business attire, her hair pulled back in a severe, elegant style. She moved with an aura of contained power that seemed to warp the very air around her, a stark, living blade in the muted, sterile environment. Her eyes, when they met Sera's disheveled, grief-stricken form, were dark with a weary dread. Before Sera could even speak, Lilith held up a hand, a gesture that was both a stop sign and a command.
"Wait," she said, her voice low and resonant. "We need to talk first. Alone."
She led Sera to the same small consultation room, the air instantly thick with unspoken tension. Lilith didn't sit. She began to pace, her expensive heels making sharp, angry clicks on the linoleum, the sound echoing the frantic pounding in Sera's chest.
"Before you are allowed to feel one ounce of pity for the girl in that room," Lilith began, her back to Sera, "you need to understand why the Kaelen you were engaged to existed at all. You have to understand what our father did to her."
Sera waited, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.
"After the first fire, after Mom died... Kaelen was a ghost," Lilith said, her voice losing its icy composure, cracking with the ghost of an old, raw pain. "She wouldn't speak. She wouldn't eat. She just sat in her room, staring at the wall, drowning in a guilt so deep it was silent. I remember... I remember finding her a week after the funeral, just standing in Mom's closet, holding one of her dresses." Lilith stopped pacing, her hand coming up to rub her temple as if warding off a migraine. "Our father... he saw that guilt and he saw it as weakness. A flaw to be hammered out. I overheard him one night. He went into her room and he just... eviscerated her."
Lilith finally turned, her eyes boring into Sera's, filled with a bitter, ancient anger. "He told her it was her fault. I heard the words. 'She went back for you. If you had been stronger, faster, she wouldn't have had to. This weakness is on you.' He broke her, piece by piece, and then told her the only way to put herself back together was to be stronger, colder, more ruthless than anyone else. To be a 'true' Blackwood."
The revelation was a physical shock. Sera felt the blood drain from her face as a montage of cruelty began to play in her mind's eye: Kaelen's cold sneer, the brutal mating mark, the vicious, dismissive words.
"She was manipulated, Seraphina. Completely," Lilith continued, her voice a low, furious hiss. "To survive in our house, to earn an ounce of our father's approval, she buried the quiet, bookish girl you remember and built a monster in her place. She started training until she collapsed. Her grades became flawless. Her heart became a block of ice. And Father praised her for it. He loved it. And when her own self-hatred wasn't enough to fuel the fire, he gave her a new target."
"Me," Sera whispered, the word a puff of air, a confirmation of a horror she was just beginning to comprehend.
"The Vespers," Lilith confirmed with a grim nod. "He redirected her grief. He twisted it from a shield into a weapon. 'Their gala, their failure, their family that took your mother from us. Never forget who owes you a blood debt.' He taught her to hate you, Seraphina. He made you the face of her pain. The hateful, arrogant Alpha you met... that wasn't Kaelen. It was a suit of armor she was forced to build around the shattered heart of a girl who thought she killed her own mother."
The truth washed over Sera, a tidal wave of ice and fire, re-contextualizing years of suffering. All the pain she had endured, it wasn't the malice of a tyrant. It was the misdirected, screaming agony of the quiet girl from the library, a girl who had been systematically tortured and rebuilt into a weapon of her father's design. Her own guilt over the gala confrontation felt petty now, a pale imitation of the soul-crushing burden Kaelen had been forced to carry for nine years.
"Now," Lilith said, her voice regaining its cold composure as she squared her shoulders, preparing for the impossible task ahead. "I have to go in there and kill our mother all over again for her. Let's get this over with."
The walk to the ICU room was the longest of Sera's life. The sound of their footsteps echoed in the silent hall, a drumbeat marching towards an execution. When they entered, Kaelen was awake. Her eyes fluttered open, the lingering confusion giving way to a wave of pure, unadulterated relief as she saw her sister. Her face, pale and bruised, lit up with a fragile, desperate hope.
"Lilith!" Her voice was weak, but it was the voice of a teenager, full of a hope that was about to be murdered. "You're here. I was so scared. I had a horrible dream. Where is she? Where's Mom? Is she in another room? Is she hurt badly? Can I see her?"
Lilith walked slowly to the bedside, each step looking like it took a monumental effort. Sera remained by the door, a silent, heartbroken witness to the impending devastation. Lilith took Kaelen's uninjured hand, her expression softening with a pain she couldn't completely hide. Her composure was a thin sheet of ice over a raging sea of grief.
"Kaelen," she began, her voice impossibly steady. "Listen to me very carefully. There was a fire at the Vesper gala. You were there. So was Mom."
"I know," Kaelen whispered, her eyes wide and pleading. "I remember the smoke. Is she hurt? Please, just tell me she's okay."
Lilith took a deep breath, the sound unnaturally loud in the quiet, beeping room. She looked her younger sister directly in the eye, her gaze a strange mixture of profound love and clinical detachment, and delivered the fatal blow.
"Mom saved you, Kae. She got you out." Lilith's voice broke, just for a second, a tiny crack in the marble facade, before she forced it back into a flat, emotionless line. "But she didn't make it out herself. She died in the fire." She squeezed Kaelen's hand, forcing her to accept the unbearable weight of the next words, a sentence that would shatter her world. "That was nine years ago."
For a moment, there was nothing. Just a profound, ringing silence as Kaelen's mind tried, and failed, to process the impossible words. A small, confused laugh, utterly devoid of humor, escaped her lips. It was a choked, airy sound, the sound of denial.
"No," she whispered, her eyes darting between Lilith and Sera, searching for the punchline of a cruel, monstrous joke. "That's not... that's not funny, Lilith. Stop joking. Tell Dad to stop. Where is she?"
"I'm not joking," Lilith said, her voice gentle but firm, an iron pillar of truth that left no room for hope. "She's gone, Kaelen. She's been gone for nine years."
The truth finally landed. It didn't crash; it seeped in, a cold, black poison flooding every part of her being. Kaelen's eyes, which had been pleading, went vacant. The fragile hope shattered, replaced by a dawning horror so immense it was silent. Her gaze became unfocused as her mind was ripped violently from the past and slammed into a present she didn't recognize, a present where her mother was a ghost, a memory, a story that had ended almost a decade ago.
The first sob was a quiet, choked gasp, a sound of pure, heart-shredding agony as nine years of un-grieved loss hit her in a single, cataclysmic wave. Then another. Her face crumpled, the carefully constructed blankness of the amnesiac replaced by the raw, unfiltered grief of a girl who had just lost her entire world for the second time. The sound that finally tore from her throat wasn't a scream, but a deep, keening wail of absolute loss, the cry of a daughter for a mother she would never see again. It was a sound of pure agony, a soul being torn in two. She tried to push herself up, to run, to escape the unbearable truth in the room, but her broken body and the tangle of tubes and wires held her captive.
Sera watched, tears streaming down her own face, as Lilith simply held on to her sister's hand, a stoic, silent anchor in a storm of unbearable grief that threatened to tear them all apart.