CHAPTER 3 — MIRROR OF ICE (AURORA)

My legs carried me out of the hall before I collapsed. The corridor leading to the bathroom was a blur of marble and bright lights. I entered, and the heavy door closed with a dull thud that echoed in my empty soul.

“Breathe,” I ordered myself, my hands gripping the cold onyx sink. But the air entering my lungs was sharp, poisoned.

Poisoned by him. By Tristan.

He was back. And with a single word, a single look, he had demolished seven years of survival. Seven years building a fortress of ice around myself, brick by bloody brick, to isolate the pain, the humiliation, the loss.

And now?

Now, all I could feel was a treacherous heat running through my veins, a shameful, animal response to the low growl of his voice, to the memory of his touch on the bracelet — a mark of fire on my skin.

I yanked the faucet on and splashed cold water on my face. The shock was minimal, insufficient. The drops slid down my neck like tears I refused to shed.

And then, as if the water had washed away a protective coating, the memory came. Clear. Gut-wrenching. His eighteenth birthday party.

…

I was so happy. So naive. Deep in my foolish heart, I believed that night would be special. After all, it would be our last night together before he left.

He was on stage, under the spotlights, the Delyon heir at his peak. And I, an idiot, looking at him as if he were mine.

“Thank you all for coming.”

His voice echoed through the hall. My heart beat faster.

“And since we’re all here…” he continued, and then his green eyes, so familiar, found mine in the middle of the crowd. There was something in them, a coldness I had never seen before. A warning I didn’t know how to decipher. “I want to thank Aurora for coming too.”

A tense smile froze on my lips. What was he doing?

“It’s always good to have some… entertainment around to liven things up.” The word fell like a block of ice into the sudden silence. Entertainment. “At least until something better comes along.”

The world collapsed. The air left my lungs. Cassius’s smile, standing beside him, was a twisted blade. The looks around me — pity, mockery, morbid curiosity — the poorly disguised laughter, burned my skin.

I wasn’t his girlfriend. I wasn’t his forbidden passion. I was entertainment. Something disposable. Something to be used until “something better” appeared.

The pain was so sharp, so deep, that I thought I would die right there. And then, as if a cruel god decided the knife hadn’t yet hit the bone, I saw it. Tristan stepping down from the stage, and Erika Meyer — blonde, impeccable, daughter of a magnate — approaching him with a victorious smile.

He wrapped his arm around her. He didn’t look at me again. The final blow. The proof that “something better” was already there.

…

The memory of that pain, of that crushing humiliation, should have been enough to extinguish any spark of desire he could ignite in me. It should have fed only hatred.

So why? Why, when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, were my lips still red and sensitive, as if eager for his taste? Why did my body still respond to the sound of his voice as if it were a prayer?

A violent fury against myself surged in my chest, hotter and more threatening than anything I felt toward him.

“You are weak. Stupid. A pathetic victim who still lets herself be carried away by the same sick magnetism that destroyed her once.” The words burst out all at once, spat with so much anger that my teeth ached.

Cassius kept me in a golden cage. But Tristan… Tristan was the hunter who knew exactly how to make the prey want to be devoured.

He thought his game was only just beginning. He didn’t understand. For me, that war had never ended. It was a silent battle fought inside me every single day: the woman who had survived against the girl who once loved a monster.

And I could not — I could not — let the girl win.

I lifted my head and stared at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes were dark, flashing with rage and conflict. The water hadn’t helped. The ice wouldn’t return so easily.

But the hatred? Hatred was a reliable fuel.

He wanted a war? He would have one.

But not on his terms. I was no longer the naive girl from that party. I was Cassius Delyon’s wife. I had learned to survive in poison. And perhaps, just perhaps, it was time to learn how to use it.