Chapter 10

Chapter 10: Splinters of Glass 

I don’t remember how I got to the hospital.

One minute I was screaming, hands soaked in Christopher’s blood, and the next I was in a white corridor under flickering lights, with a metallic taste in my mouth and a nurse asking if I was family.

“I’m his…” I paused. Not wife. Not sister. Not anything the world would understand. “…I’m the only one he’s got.”

She didn’t question it. Just pointed me toward ICU, where they’d taken him after emergency surgery. I walked like my legs weren’t mine. Everything in me was still back there, on that floor, where Ethan’s knife carved its own kind of history.

The corridor leading to his room was glass-lined, like they thought transparency made pain easier to process. But it didn’t. It just let you watch the person you love lie still, surrounded by tubes and machines, while you stood there, useless.

His face was pale. Not the kind of pale that meant rest. The kind that made you think what if I never hear his voice again?

I pressed my forehead to the glass.

“Don’t you dare leave me, Christopher,” I whispered.

---

I stayed.

Didn’t eat. Didn’t change. Didn’t move unless a nurse told me I had to. Every hour felt like I was holding my breath, waiting for someone to tell me it was over. That he was gone. But he wasn’t. Not yet.

A doctor — mid-thirties, clean-shaven, voice too soft for someone who worked with death — told me the knife had missed his heart by a breath. Another inch and—

I didn’t let him finish. I just nodded and sat back down, hugging my knees to my chest.

The only thing that kept me from unraveling completely was Aurelia’s journal. I’d shoved it into my bag without thinking. Now, I read it over and over. Her handwriting was messy, rushed, but it was like she was sitting beside me, saying, I survived worse. So will you.

---

He woke up on the third day.

At first, I thought I imagined it. His fingers twitched, barely a movement, but I shot up from the chair and leaned over him. His eyelids fluttered like they were too heavy, like waking up was a battle.

“Chris,” I whispered. “It’s me. Eden.”

His eyes opened slowly. Bloodshot. Tired. But they found mine.

“You stayed,” he croaked.

“Of course I stayed.”

A tear slipped down his cheek, and I wiped it away. I didn’t even realize I was crying too until my vision blurred.

“You should’ve run,” he said, voice barely there.

“I did,” I whispered. “But I ran straight into you.”

---

The police came that afternoon.

A detective with a tired smile and a tape recorder. He wanted a statement. The truth.

But what is truth when it’s tangled with shame, secrets, and a love you were never supposed to feel?

I gave him the safe version. The legal one. That Ethan attacked Christopher after an argument. That it was sudden. That it was personal.

I didn’t tell him that Christopher bled because I dared to love someone who was never meant to be mine.

I didn’t tell him that Ethan saw that love and decided it had to be destroyed.

Some truths aren’t for police reports.

They’re for diaries.

For aching hearts.

For 3 a.m. when the world is asleep and you’re still trying to make sense of it all.

---

I went back to the house once. Just once.

To collect the rest of Aurelia’s journals. Vincent’s letters. Anything Ethan hadn’t destroyed in his rage.

The house was too quiet. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. I walked through it like a ghost retracing old steps. Memories clung to the walls like mildew.

I passed the dining room — the one where Ethan used to toast to loyalty and family like he hadn’t buried both a long time ago.

I stopped in the hallway where it all started — where Christopher first touched my hand and something shifted in me, quietly, like a fault line preparing to break.

I thought I’d feel regret.

I didn’t.

Just grief. And fire.

---

Christopher got stronger.

He smiled again, slowly. Ate, joked, even teased me once about my terrible hospital coffee obsession.

But the light behind his eyes never came back fully. Something in him had changed — like being stabbed didn’t just take blood, but trust. Certainty. Peace.

I held his hand one night and said, “We’ll leave. Disappear. Start somewhere new.”

He shook his head. “Ethan’s still out there. You think he’ll let us vanish?”

I looked away. “I don’t know.”

But I did.

Ethan wasn’t just a monster. He was a puppeteer. A king in his own rotting empire.

If we wanted peace, we had to burn down the throne.

---

The trial didn’t take long.

Too many files. Too many voices. And when I took the stand, I gave them what they never expected — the truth.

About Aurelia.

About the threats.

About the bruises I used to hide with scarves and silence.

Christopher watched from the gallery. His eyes never left me.

And Ethan?

He sat there like none of it touched him. Like this was all beneath him. But when they cuffed him, something cracked. His eyes met mine. And for the first time, he looked afraid.

---

After the trial, I didn’t feel victorious.

I felt tired.

I collapsed into Christopher’s arms that night and cried for every girl who had been silenced. For every truth buried beneath money and fear. For Aurelia. For Vincent. For the version of me that once thought love was a cage.

“I love you,” I said into his chest.

“I know,” he whispered. “And I’m never letting go.”

---

Maybe we’re broken. Maybe we’ll never be like those love stories in the movies.

But we’re real.

And in a world built on lies and glass castles, that’s enough.

We survived.

Now, we begin.

---