Prologue

 

The Texas sky was wrong.

It wasn't just darkness. It was oppression. The kind of cloud that doesn't herald rain—it threatens a sentence. The dry heat that bathed Everglen that afternoon was gone in minutes, swallowed by thick, soot-dark clouds that advanced too fast to be natural. There was no warning. No forecast. No typical signs of changing weather.

It just... happened.

The city reacted as best it could. Doors locked, windows hastily closed, neighbors murmuring prayers in the dark. Everyone felt it. This was no ordinary storm. It was as if something had awakened.

At Everglen General Hospital, chaos manifested itself in another way.

“Nine centimeters!” announced the youngest nurse, her face bathed in sweat, her hands trembling despite her experience.

“Breathe, Helena, you're almost there,” encouraged the doctor, positioned but alert. Her tone sounded too calm to be sincere.

But Helena... didn't respond. Lying on the stretcher, legs spread, body arching in contractions, she didn't scream, didn't beg for help. She just stared.

Her gray eyes were fixed on the door, motionless, watching, haunted.

As if she knew that at any moment someone — or something — would come through it.

“They're here,” she murmured in a broken whisper. “They're coming.”

The nearest nurse, a robust woman accustomed to delivering disasters, leaned in carefully:

“Who, Helena? Who's coming?”

The answer didn't come. Instead, there was a loud, serious thunderclap, too close for comfort.

The crash made the floor vibrate.

The lamp in the room flickered. The monitor beeped belatedly.

Helena arched her body with a guttural cry, more animal than human.

And then... the cry. A sharp, strong, new sound.

The sound of life exploding in the midst of chaos.

For a moment, no one moved. Not the doctor. Not the three nurses. It was as if time had stopped, breathing along with that baby.

The doctor finally picked up the child. But what she saw in her arms made her heart race.

“Jesus...” she murmured uncontrollably.

“Her hair...” said another nurse, stepping forward.

The newborn, still covered in blood and fluids, had thick hair, white as snow in the moonlight, shiny even when wet. The strands flowed down to her tiny shoulders, fine as silk.

“I've never seen this...” said the older nurse, her voice somewhere between shock and adoration.

And then, the baby stopped crying and opened her eyes. For a second, no one breathed.

Two intense red pupils scanned the room as if studying each face. They didn't seem human.

One of the nurses let out a muffled “my God.” Another instinctively backed away, as if her feet knew something that her mind still denied.

“Give her to me.” Helena's voice returned, weak but firm as never before.

The doctor hesitated. Her arms froze mid-movement.

But there was something in Helena's gaze—a kind of uncompromising, fierce love—that made her give in.

The baby was placed in her mother's arms.

Helena held her as if she were holding her own heart outside her chest. She rested her forehead on her daughter's, her eyes filled with tears, but without a single sob.

And then she whispered:

“Aurora. You're finally here, my daughter. And I will protect you. At any cost.”

The silence that followed Aurora's birth was denser than the storm outside.

The doctor cleaned the instruments with movements that were too slow. The nurses had already left the room, taking with them sheets and remnants of what they would never forget. Helena, still sweaty, pale, and bleeding, looked at the baby in her arms as if looking at her own destiny.

“I need your help,” she said bluntly, her voice still weak but firm.

The doctor looked up.

“Of course. What do you need?”

“I want you to delete the birth record.”

Silence.

The doctor frowned, dropping what she was doing. She took a step closer, alert.

“Helena... that's not an option. We need to register the birth, the data... it's the law. And you need to be observed. Your body lost a lot of blood. The baby...”

“She can't stay here. Not another minute.” Helena's voice took on a sense of urgency. “They'll sense it. They always sense it when something like this happens.”

“Who are they?”

Helena hesitated. Her gaze shifted to the door. She whispered, as if afraid of being heard:

“Her father's people.”

The silence grew heavier.

“Helena... this is illegal. I could lose everything,” murmured the doctor.

“They're dangerous,” she continued. “If they find out Aurora was born... they'll come after us. They'll try to take her away from me.”

The doctor looked at her for a long moment. She wanted to question her. To say that it sounded absurd. But there was something in Helena's eyes—something devastated, true—that silenced her. A fear that couldn't be explained in words, but that was recognized instinctively.

“Are you sure about what you're saying?”

“I'm sure that if I don't disappear now, they'll find us.”

The doctor took a deep breath. She ran her hands over her face, fighting against all the protocols she had sworn to follow. Then she looked at Helena one last time. She saw no madness. She saw no hysteria. She saw a mother willing to do anything to protect her daughter.

“All right.” Her voice was low. “I'll take care of it.”

Helena nodded, silently grateful.

A few hours later, with dawn breaking and the storm reduced to a thick drizzle, Helena left through the back door of the hospital with a sheet covering her arms. Underneath it, Aurora slept.

The old family car was parked on the other side of the fence, its headlights off. Inside, everything they owned fit into two suitcases and a cardboard box in the back seat.

Helena didn't look back.

She got into the car, started the engine, and disappeared down the wet road, leaving no trace.

That same dawn, they disappeared from the city.

And almost nineteen years later, in a cramped apartment in the suburbs of New York...

Aurora stared at the bathroom mirror with a smile on her lips.

The reflection showed a girl with dark, straight hair tied in a high ponytail. Brown contact lenses hid the crimson eyes she only saw when she woke up — before putting them in, alone, every day.

The next day, she would turn nineteen.

But what made her heart beat faster was not her age. It was the fact that, for the first time, she had been living in the same place for exactly twelve months. A whole year without running away. Without changing her name. Without closing the curtains every time the wind changed.

A year living in New York.

Helena was still paranoid, yes. She still kept a suitcase packed under her bed. She still slept with her phone under her pillow. But something about that city... seemed different.

Aurora stepped away from the mirror and sat on the edge of the bed, feeling her feet touch the cold floor. Her hair had been dyed since childhood. There were photos of her with every possible shade—dark brown, black, even red. Never white. Never natural.

Aurora accepted it. Not without rebellion. But without choice.

It was easier to hide than to explain what no one would understand.

That morning, however, she felt light.

But something inside her—that old feeling that never completely disappeared—warned her that the peace would not last.