Chapter 10

Chapter 10: Splinters of Glass

Hospitals always smell like denial.

Bleach, sterile metal, faint blood. The scent of pain cleaned over, like grief scrubbed into silence. That’s what hit me first as I stepped into the ICU waiting room — then the silence. The kind that speaks louder than screams.

Christopher was alive. Barely.

They had stabilized him, said the blade missed his heart by inches. Lucky, they called it. I didn’t believe in luck anymore. Only survival.

I watched through the glass as he lay pale and unconscious, tubes threading from his arms like ghostly veins. Machines whispered rhythmically — reminders that life could be broken down into beeps and numbers, even if the heart behind them was shattered.

He looked so unlike the man I knew. No fire in his eyes. No quiet defiance in his jaw. Just stillness. As though part of him had already crossed over and hadn’t decided whether to return.

---

I didn’t sleep that night. I paced the corridor outside his room until dawn, Aurelia’s diary pressed to my chest like a shield. The nurses pitied me. The doctor offered reassurances I didn’t trust. No one asked why he’d been stabbed. No one asked why I looked like I hadn’t stopped crying in days.

They all assumed.

But no one knew.

No one knew that the man who tried to kill him was my stepfather-in-law.

Or that I was in love with the man fighting for his life.

---

Ethan was in custody. For now. But I knew men like him — they didn’t stay caged for long. Power had a way of finding keys where none should exist.

A detective came to question me the next morning. Young. Too fresh-faced to understand the gravity of generational sins.

“I need a statement,” he said gently. “Can you tell me what happened?”

I stared at the paper. Blank. Waiting. Like the future. But I couldn’t write it down. Not yet. I couldn’t reduce everything to bullet points and quotes. Not when I was still bleeding beneath the skin.

So I told him what he needed to hear — a domestic dispute, self-defense, family tensions. Enough to hold Ethan longer. Enough to buy Christopher time.

But not the truth.

Not the part where love had blossomed between the cracks of trauma. Not the part where desire burned hotter in the dark than in the light. Not the part where I couldn’t bear to lose the one man who had seen me completely — and chosen me anyway.

---

Three days passed before Christopher woke.

His fingers twitched first. Then his eyes fluttered. And when they finally opened, they searched for me.

I was there.

“I thought I lost you,” I whispered, brushing hair from his damp forehead.

“You almost did,” he rasped, his voice paper-thin.

I leaned close, pressing my forehead to his. “Never do that again.”

“Wasn’t planning to,” he murmured, a faint smile tugging at his mouth. “But he almost made the decision for me.”

“He won’t hurt you again,” I said. “He won’t hurt either of us. I have the diary. I have the letters. He’s finished.”

But Christopher’s smile faded.

“You don’t understand, Eden. Ethan’s not just a monster… he’s a master. He’s buried his tracks for years. If we don’t destroy him completely… he’ll rise again.”

And the fear in his eyes wasn’t for himself.

It was for me.

---

Back at the mansion, I moved quietly.

I returned only to gather the final pieces of proof. Aurelia’s old journals. Vincent’s hidden letters. Audio files I found tucked away on an encrypted USB drive — conversations between Ethan and board members, enough to implicate him in manipulation, embezzlement, and possibly murder.

It was more than enough.

But the house resisted.

Mirrors cracked without touch. Lights flickered. The air turned cold.

I wasn’t sure if it was guilt or ghosts. But I knew this place had long since ceased being a home. It was a mausoleum. A beautiful lie built on rotting truths.

As I packed the last box, I stood in the hallway where it had all begun — the first time Ethan’s eyes lingered too long, the first time his hand grazed my shoulder, the first time I told myself it was nothing.

I saw the girl I used to be. Naive. Desperate. Lonely.

And I saw the woman I had become — scarred, awakened, in love with a man she should have never touched.

And I didn’t regret it.

Not one moment.

---

Christopher recovered slowly.

I moved in with him temporarily, ignoring the headlines and whispers. We had become a story — the fallen heiress and the wounded stepson, tangled in scandal, betrayal, and forbidden love.

But we ignored the world.

Because the world had never been kind to people like us.

He healed faster with me beside him. I read him passages from Aurelia’s journal — not the painful ones, but the pieces that still carried beauty. Her poetry. Her dreams. Her defiance.

“She was like you,” he said once. “She fought even when the odds were impossible.”

I looked at him, fingers laced through his. “And you? What are you?”

His gaze didn’t waver. “Yours.”

---

When the trial began, I was the first to testify.

I told them everything.

About the manipulation. About Aurelia’s disappearance. About Vincent’s suspicious death. About the control Ethan wielded over the estate and every life in it.

I handed them the proof. The USB. The locket. The letters.

And when I was done, I looked Ethan in the eye as they took him away in chains.

He didn’t speak.

But his silence spoke volumes.

---

Back in Christopher’s arms that night, I cried for everything we had lost.

Aurelia. Vincent. Our innocence.

But I also cried for what we still had.

Each other.

And for the first time, I let myself believe we could build something new from the ruins. Something fragile, yes — but true. And beautiful.

A crimson thread, no longer bleeding.

But binding us together.