Chapter four: Death's Game

Serena 

A month later 

I woke up to the splitting light shinning into my eyes, I darted my gaze around, to the sight of test tubes, monitors, drips...

And then it all came back to me.

The accident, Liam, Ethan and Lucas, the step brother I was supposed to avoid.

"Mrs Warrick, you're awake," A doctor called, stepping into the room.

"What did you call me?" I asked, my throat raw, anger bobbing from my insides.

"I'm sorry, Miss Serena," She corrected, bowing apologetically.

"How long have I been here?" I asked, attempting to sit up, but she held me back back.

"You cannot stand up yet," she said, holding Mr back to the bed when my eyes caught something on her phone about Ethan Warrick.

"What's that?" I asked, my voice raspy.

She stared down at her phone, staring at the screenbefore she looked back at me.

She swallowed, the lie catching in her throat like a fishhook. “Um—nothing.” Then she switched the screen off too quickly, as if furtive fingers could erase all the words.

“Let me see. Now.” I didn’t give her room to bargain. My voice came out thinner than I wanted, but it held enough steel to make her hand tremble.

She opened the phone and handed it to me. The glow painted the room in blue as I read. Ethan’s statement sat front and proud—slick and controlled, crafted the way he crafted everything: two tidy paragraphs, a practiced cadence that put the blame somewhere else.

“Tragic accident. My wife, in a fit of reckless behaviour, drove while intoxicated. My deepest condolences to our son. We are cooperating fully with authorities.”

Below, the headlines fed like vultures: DRUNK MOTHER KILLS HER CHILD; WARRICK HEIR: TRAGIC LOSS CAUSED BY IRRESPONSIBLE PARENTING.

My throat closed. I scrolled, though I didn’t want any more. The comments scrolled faster than I could breathe—people biting and merciless.

“Serves her right,” one read. “She should’ve died with him.”

“She was always unstable.”

“Finally justice.”

A hand—mine—slammed down on the glass until the sound startled even me.

“Died alongside my son,” I repeated, tasting the words as if they were foreign currency. My hands were shaking. The room tilted in small, soft ways.

I turned to the doctor, who had retreated two steps too quickly. Her eyes were that useless, sympathetic look I had come to hate. “Please take note of this name,” I said slowly, each syllable a hammer. “Write it down. Keep it. I’ll be needing it.” I handed the phone back to her, wiping my face with the heel of my hand until it smarted.

She blinked, then nodded, fumbling for a pen. The institution of pity did not suit anyone in this room, and it didn’t suit me now.

“And Liam?” I asked, my voice cracking like shattering glass.

The doctor and a nurse exchanged a look that said nothing good. “He’s—his body is at the hospital,” she answered, words careful as if the wrong words might shatter me, again. 

“Mr. Lucas insisted they keep him. He said—he said you had to be the one to bury him.”

The room released a small, collective breath. Someone—Lucas—had not let the world swallow everything without letting me close the lid myself.

And the knowledge that his small body was still somewhere, waiting, knotted something in my chest into a line I could follow.

The door opened then and he came in like a shadow with company—wet hair, that old jacket haloed with small beads of rain. Lucas. My voice met his before I had a full breath.

“Serena.” He didn’t rush; he never did. He moved as a man who measured the weight of things.

“Lucas.” The name left me raw. Tears came again, sharper this time. They were not the slow, endless kind but jagged, volcanic ones that burned your throat. They were violent. They shook me until the bedframe rattled.

He crossed to my side and took my hand without asking. His fingers were solid, warm, grounding. He did not look at the phone, at the words—he only looked at me, and in that look there was less pity and more a promise.

“What did he say?” I managed. “What did Ethan tell them?”

Lucas’s jaw worked once. “He spun it. He called you reckless—said you were drunk. He made you the villain before the doctors had finished telling anyone what was real.”

My stomach dropped out entirely. I had been a collection of murmurs and subheadings in the mouths of others; my grief turned into someone else’s plot point. Ethan’s voice—smooth, carefully modulated—rang in my head like a bell tolled for someone else.

“You made that statement?” I whispered at no one, as if saying his tactics aloud would make them less plausible.

He didn’t need to answer. His silence said more: yes, that man had already constructed the narrative he needed, the version where he was raked over by grief and the world took his side.

I sobbed then, a raw wrenching sound that seemed to please the ceiling for nothing and everything. Lucas tightened his hold. “You’ll get to see him,” he said. “They kept him for you. I wouldn’t—” He stopped himself, swallowing down the rest of whatever that would have completed.

“Thank you.” The words came out speared through my salt. It felt small to be grateful for decency. But gratitude is a crooked thing when the bar is set so low.

He pushed a chair closer and they helped me dress. My body cooperated in dull grunts, in slow movements like a puppet warming to life. My limbs were threadbare with weakness, my hair clinging to my face in wet strands. It took forever and then one more forever, and finally we were out of the antiseptic smell and into the rain.

The city was a smear of light and gray water. The rain struck the world hard enough to wash color from anything it touched; it felt right that the sky mirror the inside of me. 

Lucas kept his coat over my shoulders though it did nothing against the downpour. The umbrella he held over us was more ritual than shelter—he was a silent priest and I, a penitent.

They led me to a small room in the hospital where Liam lay. They had cleaned him, tucked him into a tiny white blanket, the curl at his temple combed as gently as possible. The sight of him cut something open that I didn’t know was sealed. He was smaller than I remembered, smaller than a mind understands without the heavy presence of the living.

“Mommy,” I whispered, and it felt like an ownership claim. My fingers shook as I reached out. His skin was cool beneath my touch. I pressed my forehead to his and the world narrowed to that small, unbearable contact. I told him everything with the ferocity of a person trying to cram a lifetime into a single breath—how he was my sun, how the park was a kingdom for his laugh, and how the blue blanket we had bought would always be his in my memory.

When they wheeled the tiny coffin into the earth, the rain refused to let up. It pelted my face and mixed with salt and the dark soil clinging to the hem of my dress.

 I knelt in mud that fought to pull me down and kept grounding me at the same time. My hands were frozen, but I clenched them around so much more than wood, a memory I would not lose, and fury that had teeth.

“I swear,” I said then, my voice split and thin, but steady. “To everyone who had a hand in this—Elena, Mia, Ethan, anyone who touched the wheel, anyone who silenced a call—you will answer. I will make you pay for what you did to my son.”

Lucas did not try to soothe or quiet me. He did not hand me platitudes. He stood, a dark silhouette in the rain, and let me fill the air with my promise. He understood the shape of vows; he had a map of battles in his chest. He let me have this one.

The rain washed the words into the soil but it could not erase the oath. I rose from the grave with water squeezing from my sleeves.

There would be no public meltdown, no spectacle for the cameras. There would be calculation. There would be patience. There would be the slow, exquisite unmaking of whatever shield had allowed them to play with my life and walk away.