LOGINCLARISSA.
The Cloak’s ultimatum hung in the room like poison, heavy, slow, and ready to seep into every crack of my life until there was nothing left of the woman I used to be.
Choose one.
I was supposed to make a choice between my father and the one man I had come to love.
I felt the air fracture around me. It wasn’t just fear; it was suffocation, thick and heavy at the back of my throat. My father went still, his entire body tightening in a way I had never seen. Devan froze, his shoulders hunched, his breath caught between defiance and dread. I could almost hear my own heartbeat punching against my ribs, wild and frantic, as though it wanted to escape my body altogether.
Before I could speak before I could even bring myself to think, my father stepped forward.
He didn’t do it dramatically, didn’t puff out his chest or raise his hands. He simply stood in front of me, a man who had carried too many sins for t
FREDA.I moved through the hospital dreamily, half-drifting between realities. Every breath scraped through my lungs, too shallow and barely keeping me tethered to the present. I didn’t know how long I had been running; everything had blurred into a smear of blood, adrenaline, and the echo of gunfire still ringing in my skull.The corridors around me felt unreal, too bright and too clean. For one fragile second I dared to believe I was close to slipping free, slipping through some unseen crack in the world, a gap the darkness chasing me hadn’t noticed yet.But my illusion shattered the moment I turned the corner.Something shifted in the air, and I could feel the wrongness in the atmosphere. The hospital, always buzzing with fluorescent humming, nurses murmuring, stretchers wheeling, machinery beeping, held itself painfully still like it was holding its breath. Like it recognized me.A cold pressure wrapped around my ribs, squeezing, wh
DEVAN.I woke to the metallic taste of iron coating my tongue and something tacky and half-dried flaking against my cheek. For a moment, the world refused to settle into a single shape. The ceiling above me flickered like bad footage, the light bulging, stretching, and shrinking again. My heartbeat thudded so violently in my ears that I couldn’t tell where the pain ended and where my fear began.I sat up too fast and the room spun before my eyes. My skull felt split at the center; not from the fall alone, but from what clawed in my mind. I still felt that presence… that pressure. It had been scraping memories loose, shredding time until I couldn’t tell what belonged to yesterday and what belonged to some nightmare future.Every blink brought a different flash.I saw Clarissa’s face, wet with tears, her mouth forming words he couldn’t hear. I could see Marcus collapsing on the floor, his eyes already vacant. I saw Bruce’s mansion swallowed in shadows. I also saw Isabella screaming but
ISABELLA.The Cloak sat across from her with the sort of unbothered calm that made me bothered instead. One leg crossed over the other, his fingers draped lazily along the velvet armrest, his posture relaxed in a way that dared me to challenge him. He didn’t just occupy space; he owned it. He controlled it and manipulated every breath I took inside it.Her voice, hoarse and strained, cut through the thick air.“Who are you?”The words carried more force than I expected. It carried more desperation, too. I hated that. I hated giving him any hint of how deeply the mystery behind him gnawed at me.He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he tilted his masked head as if studying an amusing pet. The silence stretched long enough to feel like a punishment.Then a soft, humorless laugh slipped from under the mask.“If you want my face,” he said calmly, “earn it.”My stomach twisted. He wanted a game. Of course he did. Men like him always did. The kind of men who believed torment was a form of
ISABELLA.I barely remembered the discharge papers. They had been waved in front of me, signed automatically, with the nurse’s voice floating somewhere above my head like a distant radio signal. The hallway spun a little, and the sharp white lights buzzed too loudly. I couldn’t tell if it was the medication, exhaustion, or the lingering fog of trauma that made everything float around me instead of sitting still.But I did remember the man who came to wheel me out. He had broad shoulders, was dressed in a black uniform, had perfectly pressed gloves on, and the letter C stitched into his left sleeve, in crisp white threading.I had tried to speak, tried to dig my nails into the armrests and force myself out of the wheelchair, but my body refused to obey. My limbs dangled like borrowed parts, my voice cracking into ragged breaths. Yet, he never said a word.The man rolled me through the sliding doors, down the ramp, and toward a waiting black van. The moment I saw it, dark, unmarked, and
FREDA.I felt just the impact at first, the violent jolt that slammed through my body like I had been struck by a hammer. My breath ripped out of me as my knees buckled, and I hit the floor hard. The ceiling spun above me in fractured pieces, shadows smearing into streaks of white. Heat spread across my abdomen, thick and fast, pooling beneath her like a sinking tide. I blinked, dizzy, feeling the warm wetness soak through my clothes before my mind caught up to reality.I had been shot.A sound tore through the room, and I realized belatedly it was Alexandro. He materialized from the corner like a nightmare spilled into the waking world. His face, always so calm even in crisis, had collapsed into terror. He dropped to his knees beside me, hands trembling as they pressed desperately over the wound.“Freda—Freda, stay with me. I’m so sorry. I’m so damn sorry.” His voice was cracking everywhere, splintering under panic.I wanted to answer him, to say something cutting or sarcastic or jus
CLARISSA.My fingers dug into the doorframe hard enough to make my knuckles ache, but it was the only thing keeping me upright. My legs felt numb, my lungs tight, my pulse hammering in frantic bursts that refused to settle. I sensed Bruce behind me before she heard him. It was the shift in the air; the sudden drop in temperature, the suffocating heaviness that always arrived like a warning whenever Bruce decided to ruin something. I didn’t want to turn around. I already knew what would be waiting for her. But I turned anyway.And there it was, exactly what she expected. Exactly what I feared. The same thing that sickened me.A gun.Bruce held it steady with both hands, the barrel leveled directly at my heart. His hands didn’t shake. He had just the same composure he had once used in their marriage to mask the rot underneath his skin.The sight didn’t shock me. I had lost the privilege of shock years ago, but it hollowed my chest, scraped something raw inside me that I had been trying







