Chapter 6: Broke down and Cry

Vlad’s POV

“Uno, no more chocolate. You’ll ruin your dinner.”

I heard a voice behind me. It was a female, her voice was calm and familiar in a way that something hit me. 

I turned around out of curiosity and the world stopped around me when I saw who owned the voice.

She was standing a few steps away, the boy at her side, wiping chocolate from his fingers with quiet patience. My chest tightened so suddenly I thought I might collapse right there on the stone path. My heart squeezed hard, cruelly, like it recognized her before my mind could protect me. My wolf howled, wanting to take control, wanting to claim her again. He recognized her before I could even. 

I couldn’t breathe.

She looked up and smiled at me, innocently just like Cheska did the first time we saw each other.  And I saw her. 

“I’m sorry about that, Sir. Uno’s favorite is chocolate and he already ate it before we left the hotel,” she said in a voice I memorized even when I closed my eyes. 

Sir… She called me sir. Doesn't she remember me?

She’s before me, not the version my guilt replayed every night. She was right there, solid and real, wearing a different dress, a different calmness but the same eyes. The same shape of her mouth. The same face I had watched turn away from me as she ran.

My lips moved before I could stop them.

“Cheska.”

The name fell out of me like the wound I tried to stitch reopened.

She frowned slightly and looked at me confused. 

“I’m sorry?” she said.

I searched her face for any recognition for me but nothing. Its just blank. She didn’t recognizee me. And that’s was when I noticed it, a small mole under her right eye. It wasn’t there before. That tiny difference shattered the fragile hope rising in my chest and made it worse at the same time. My breath came out broken. My hands trembled at my sides as my mind screamed that this was impossible.

Dead people don’t stand in gardens correcting children about chocolate.

“You–” My voice failed me. I swallowed hard and tried again. “You’re… you look like someone I knew.”

She studied me carefully, the way one looks at a stranger who has crossed a line without meaning to. Theres was no recognition sparked in her eyes not even pain and memories clawing their way back at me.

“I’m Violet,” she said gently. “You must be mistaken.”

Violet.

The name felt wrong in my mouth. Its like like calling the moon by another name and expecting it to answer.

The boy tugged at her hand. 

“Mama.”

The word hit me harder than any blows from the fight ever gave to me.

Mama.

My knees nearly buckled.

She looked down at him and smiled, warmly and real. 

“Just a minute, Uno.”

She has a son and he’s two years old.

The timeline has no doubt and it slammed into me without mercy.

I couldn’t hear anything else. The garden seemmed blurred and the sky tilted. All I could see was her hand in his. All I could hear was that one word rosanting over and over in my head.

Mama.

She looked back at me, concern finally flickering across her face. 

“Are you alright?”

I wasn’t.

I was standing in front of the woman I buried without a body. The woman I believed died hating me. The woman who carried my child to her death.

And she was alive and she didn’t know me. And she had built a life where I did not exist.

“I–” I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to breathe through the pain tearing through me. “I thought you were someone else.”

She nodded, accepting that answer easily like my confusion didn’t matter enough to question.

“I hope you find who you’re looking for,” she said softly. “And if you excuse us,” she added and turned away.

Just like before but only this time, she walked away holding a child’s hand, her steps steady, her back straight, her life whole without me in it.

I stood there, shaking, watching her disappear down the path.

She’s alive, changed and untouchable.

And for the first time since the night she ran from me, I understood the cruelest truth of all.

Death would have been acceptable if she didn't recognize me. 

I didn’t realize I was crying until my vision completely failed me. My chest collapsed in on itself, breath coming out in broken pieces I couldn’t control. I staggered back a step, then another, my hands shaking like my body no longer remembered how to stand upright.

Cheska’s alive but she doesn’t remember me. But how? 

I pressed my fist against my mouth, but the sound still escaped me. A low, ruined sound that didn’t belong to an Alpha. It belonged to a man who had just seen the impossible and lost it anyway.

“Vlad.”

My grandfather’s voice cut through the noise in my head. He was already moving, already reaching for me before I could fall apart completely.

I broke.

I bent forward like something had snapped inside my spine, my hands gripping the fabric of his shirt as I cried openly, violently, like the grief I had buried for two years finally found air.

“She’s dead,” I choked. “I buried her. I watched the sea take her. I–I saw the test. I killed her.”

My grandfather held me without hesitation. He steadied me with the same arms that once carried me when I was small and afraid.

“She was there,” I sobbed. “She looked at me like I was nothing. Like I was a stranger. She had a child. She–”

My breath hitched so hard it hurt.

“She called him Uno.”

My grandfather stiffened.

I didn’t see it. I felt it.

“She told him no more chocolate,” I whispered, voice cracking beyond repair. “That was her voice. That was Cheska’s voice. I would know it anywhere.”

He didn’t interrupt me and let me unravel.

“She has her face,” I said. “Her eyes. Everything. Just one mole under her right eye. Just enough to tell me she’s not the woman I lost… but enough to destroy me anyway.”

My knees finally gave out.

He lowered us both to the chair like he knew this moment was coming. Like he had been waiting for the truth to reach me instead of the other way around.

“I dreamed of her for two years,” I said hoarsely. “I begged for forgiveness from a grave that never answered. And now she’s alive. Alive, Grandpa. And she doesn’t know me.”

I covered my face with my hands, shoulders shaking. I don’t care if I’m not the Alpha everyone respected. I don’t care if someone sees this part of me, part of me that has long been eating me alive. 

“I ruined her,” I whispered. “I pushed her into the dark and she crawled out without me. She found a life where I don’t exist. A child who will never call me anything.”

My grandfather’s hand rested on my head, firm and grounding.

“I thought she was Cheska too. I saw the resemblance the moment she walked in. I thought grief had finally taken my sight. I thought I was seeing a ghost.”

My breath came shallow.

“She looked peaceful,” he continued. “Whole, not the face of a woman still carrying pain.”

That hurt worse than anything else because he was right.

“She survived me,” I said, almost laughing through tears. “Isn’t that cruel? That she survived me.”

I looked up at him, eyes burning.

“Grandpa… if fate wanted to punish me, it succeeded because losing her once nearly killed me but watching her live happy, loved and become a mother with no memory of me at all, I die. That was a punishment I would never escape…”

And somewhere deep inside me, beneath the regret and the grief and the shame, one truth settled in quietly, mercilessly.

I didn’t deserve her.

And now, fate was making sure I would never forget that again.