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Chapter 19
Last Updated:
2025-05-16 18:55:16---
Chapter 19: Ashes Between Us
The fire started slowly.
A single flare in the server room. Then another in the lab. The chemicals hissed and spat as heat crawled across the sterile metal surfaces, smoke curling like fingers grasping at forgotten sins.
Isla watched it burn.
Her body trembled, not from cold—but from everything unraveling within. Her skin felt too tight, her lungs too small for what she had just learned.
She wasn’t born.
She was built.
A copy. A construct. An echo.
And yet, she felt so much. Too much.
The heat licked at the walls behind her, but all she could see was the small boy she had once imagined—herself at seven, sobbing in the garden after a nightmare, her mother rocking her with a lullaby.
That memory was a lie.
Someone had placed it inside her like a needle beneath skin.
Christopher stepped beside her, face flickering in the light of the flames. His jaw was clenched, his body taut like a bow pulled too tight.
“You don’t have to watch,” he said gently.
“I do,” Isla whispered. “They made me here. I need to see it die.”
His hand hovered near hers.
She didn’t reach for it. Not yet.
Behind them, Ronan stood silent in the snow, watching the bunker collapse in on itself. There was no sadness on his face. Only a solemn peace. He had made his decision long ago.
“Where will you go?” Christopher asked him.
Ronan shrugged. “Don’t know. Nowhere people look too closely.”
“You could come with us,” Isla offered quietly.
Ronan looked at her with an expression too complex to name. “We are the same, Isla. But we were shaped differently. You had a home. A family. Even if it was fiction.”
“You had no one.”
He didn’t confirm it.
Didn’t need to.
After a long pause, he said, “You loved her, didn’t you? Aurelia?”
Isla nodded slowly.
Ronan’s voice softened. “Then hold onto that. Don’t let it be rewritten.”
She felt tears prick her eyes again. “I don’t even know what’s real anymore.”
Christopher’s voice broke in. “Your pain is real. Your choices are real. And… what we’ve built together, however fragile, that is real.”
Isla looked at him.
That quiet man who had always kept his distance. Who had touched her with reverence and rage. Who had seen the broken pieces and still wanted to hold them.
She whispered, “Why do you still stay?”
Christopher’s eyes didn’t flinch. “Because I’ve fallen in love with something I was never meant to understand.”
Isla felt her breath hitch.
Not joy.
Fear.
Because love was dangerous. Love made her vulnerable. And yet—it was the only thing grounding her now.
Ronan turned to go, nodding once. “You were never just a copy, Isla. You were their first mistake. And their last.”
And then he vanished into the woods, smoke curling behind him like the ghost of what had been.
---Back at the Cabin
The ride home was quieter.
Snow had begun to fall again, soft and surreal, like ash that couldn’t decide if it wanted to bury or bless.
Inside the cabin, Isla stood in the kitchen, fingers numb on the ceramic mug she didn’t sip from. She was staring at the wall, but her mind was replaying the file again.
Subject 317x. Isla-R. Emotional variability high. Attachment instability. Termination advised if deviance exceeds protocol.
Termination.
Deviance.
She pressed the mug too tightly.
It shattered.
Christopher came running. “Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” she snapped.
Then softer. “I’m fine.”
He crouched beside her, picked the pieces from her shaking hands. One of the shards had sliced her palm, and blood dripped silently onto the wood floor.
Christopher didn’t flinch.
He pressed a cloth to her hand, voice calm. “You feel pain. You bleed. You survive. You’re real enough.”
She looked at him, eyes wet but furious. “What happens when I break again? When I fall apart in ways you can’t fix?”
He didn’t speak.
He leaned in.
And kissed her.
Not like the first time—drunk on grief and loneliness. Not like the second, or the third, or the ones that followed in fevered desperation.
This kiss was slow. Deep. A question.
And an answer.
When they pulled apart, her breath was shallow.
“Make me forget,” she whispered.
He didn’t ask what she meant.
He lifted her into his arms, carried her through the quiet hallway to the bedroom, laid her down like something sacred and haunted.
His fingers trembled as they slid under her shirt. Her skin was cold. His mouth warm. And still, he was careful. Worshipful.
As though he was trying to trace her memories with every touch—to rewrite the pain with tenderness.
Isla let him in.
Let him see the trembling beneath her strength.
And for a while, she did forget.
The fire.
The files.
The voice that said she was never real.
She only remembered his breath on her skin, and the way he said her name like it anchored him to this world.
---Later That Night
She lay in the dark, curled into his side. His heartbeat was steady beneath her ear, but her thoughts spun too fast.
“Christopher?” she murmured.
He was still awake. “Yes.”
“What if they come for us?”
He didn’t answer right away. Then:
“They already did. And we’re still standing.”
She closed her eyes.
“I want to know more. About her. Aurelia. About what else they took from me.”
“We’ll find it,” he promised.
“I want to find Ethan.”
A pause.
“Why?”
She sat up. “Because I think he knew. He always looked at me like I wasn’t his daughter. Like I was a… a ghost.”
“You want to confront him?”
“I have to.”
Christopher nodded slowly. “Then we go back to the beginning.”
Isla stared into the darkness.
Home.
The place she once called safe.
Where Ethan waited with secrets. Where her past was buried in marble and silence.
And where love first twisted into something sharp.
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