Chapter Twenty Nine

Kyla. 

Her eyes burned into mine, sharp and unyielding, like knives pressed against my skin. The silence between us was no longer just silence it was a battlefield, filled with every unspoken word, every wound, every drop of venom that had festered for years.

She folded her arms, her lip curling into a cruel smile. “You know what, Kyla?” she said, her voice low, dangerous, like poison wrapped in silk. “You don’t belong here. You should go back to wherever you crawled out from. Back to your little hole. Because you don’t belong in this life anymore. Not with Jake. Not with this family. Not with anyone.”

My breath caught in my throat. Her words struck deeper than I wanted to admit. My chest ached, my pulse racing.

“You’ve taken enough,” she continued, stepping closer, her perfume thick in the air, suffocating me. “You’ve had your turn. Your time is over. This is my life now. And if you think you can come back here and ruin what I’ve built with him, you’re wrong. Dead wrong.”

The way she said it, dead wrong, made my stomach twist.

I tried to steady my voice, but it trembled. “Amina, please. Stop this. You don’t understand”

“Oh, I understand perfectly.” She leaned in, her eyes flashing with triumph. “You think you’re still that woman he once loved, but you’re not. You’re weak. You’re broken. You’re lying in a hospital bed, dependent on machines just to keep you alive. What makes you think Jake will ever choose you again?”

Her words sank into me like venom, each syllable squeezing the air from my lungs. My body trembled as I struggled to breathe, my hands gripping the sheets.

“You should have stayed gone,” she whispered harshly. “Back where you came from. Because if you stay here, Kyla, I swear, you’ll regret it.”

My chest clenched so tightly I thought it would split open. My head spun, a wave of dizziness rushing over me. The steady beeping of the monitor beside me quickened, sharp and shrill.

“No,” I gasped, clutching at my chest. My vision blurred, black spots dancing across my eyes. “Stop, please…”

The beeping grew faster, louder, insistent.

Amina’s eyes widened slightly, but she didn’t move toward me. She just stood there, watching, her lips parting as though even she hadn’t expected her words to hit this hard.

Suddenly the machine shrieked, the alarm blaring. My pulse was out of control, my body trembling as though it no longer belonged to me.

The door burst open. Two nurses rushed in, their voices urgent, cutting through the chaos.

“Her sugar’s spiking get the kit!”

“Check her IV line, now!”

Hands swarmed me, cold and firm, pressing needles, adjusting tubes, voices calling out numbers I couldn’t understand. My body was jolting, trapped between panic and collapse.

Through the blur, I caught one last glimpse of Amina. She had stepped back, her face pale, her lips pressed tightly together. For once, she didn’t speak. She didn’t sneer. She didn’t throw more poison.

She just slipped out of the room, as quiet as a shadow.

The nurses didn’t notice, too busy fighting to stabilize me, their hands moving fast, their voices firm.

But I noticed.

I noticed how easily she left me to drown in the storm she had created. How she had dropped her venom and then vanished into silence, leaving me to bear the weight of her words alone.

And as the darkness tugged at the edges of my mind, one thought cut deeper than all the rest.

My own sister had come to finish breaking me.

And she nearly succeeded.

And I was not going to let her. I had hoped talking to her, I could get through her, but she was gone.

During the five years I was gone, I had hired all types of investigators to look into everything that had happened to me. 

I was in denial about what they found out, but seeing her, talking to her like this, it was undeniable that she was the one behind my accident and everything that happened to me.