CHAPTER 4: Replaced

Elira’s POV

I found Mother’s room by memory alone, my feet remembering the turns before my mind fully caught up to where I was going.

Before prison, I could have recited her morning routine in my sleep — the exact dosage of her heart medication, the order she liked her tea prepared, the particular way she needed her pillows arranged so her back wouldn’t ache by midday.

I’d spent years learning the small architecture of her care, memorizing it the way other girls memorized dance steps or love poems, because it had felt like the truest way I knew to say I love you back to someone who’d given me a home.

I knocked softly and let myself in when a voice called for me to enter.

The room was already full of quiet, competent motion. A nurse I didn’t recognize stood beside the bed, adjusting an IV line with practiced efficiency. A tray of medication sat on the side table, neatly organized into little labeled compartments. And Selene, still in her dressing gown, hair pulled back loosely, sat in the chair beside the bed, holding Mother’s hand and speaking to the nurse in a low, familiar voice about dosage timing.

“She’s more nauseous in the mornings now,” Selene was saying, “so if we push the second dose back an hour, it usually helps.”

The nurse nodded, jotting something down. “That matches what Dr. Aldren noted last week.”

Mother, propped against her pillows, looked pale but peaceful, her eyes drifting toward me as I stood in the doorway. “Elira. Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I said, and stepped further into the room, some old instinct already reaching for the tray of medication, for the small, familiar task of counting doses.

Selene noticed and smiled at me, warm and easy. “We’ve got it handled, but you’re welcome to sit. Mother, doesn’t it feel good having both girls here?”

Both girls. As though I were an addition to an already complete picture rather than the person who used to be the entire picture herself.

Mother’s smile was tired but genuine. “It does.”

I stood there a moment longer, watching the smooth, practiced rhythm of a routine that no longer had a place carved out for me in it. The nurse deferred to Selene without hesitation.

The medication schedule Selene had just recited matched, word for word, what I would have said myself two years ago — except she said it with the easy confidence of someone who’d been doing this every day, not someone remembering it from a life interrupted.

There was nothing left here that needed my hands. The role I’d been holding onto through two years of grey stone and worse — the one thing I still believed I could come back to — had already been quietly, thoroughly filled by someone else.

“I’ll let you rest,” I said, and left before anyone could see whatever was happening on my face.

I made it as far as the end of the corridor before I had to stop, one hand braced against the wall, breathing through something that didn’t have a clean name. It wasn’t jealousy — I made myself certain of that much, turning the feeling over until I was sure.

Selene wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was simply present in a way I hadn’t been allowed to be, learning a routine I’d once known by heart because someone had to, because Mother’s body didn’t wait for anyone’s timeline but its own.

The problem wasn’t her. The problem was that there had been exactly one door I still believed might open for me when I came home, and I’d just watched it close so quietly no one else in the room had even noticed it happening.

***

I didn’t go back to my room. Sitting alone with nothing to do felt worse than almost anything else I could imagine, so instead I wandered the halls until I found the kitchens, where the household’s preparations for the King’s continued visit were still in full, frantic motion.

Linens needed folding. Silver needed polishing. Flowers, dozens of them, needed arranging into vases that lined the long hall leading to the receiving room. Nobody asked who I was. Nobody had time to. A harried woman thrust a basket of unpolished silverware into my hands almost the moment I stepped through the door, muttering something about being short-staffed before rushing off toward some other crisis.

I sat at the edge of a long table and began polishing.

It was, strangely, the first thing that had felt right since I’d come home. Simple. Useful. Nobody watching me for signs of instability, nobody deciding whether my presence in a room was a threat or an inconvenience. Just silver, and cloth, and the small satisfying work of making something shine.

I lost track of time doing it. That was its own kind of mercy.

“You.”

The voice cut through the kitchen noise, sharp and unfamiliar, and I looked up to find a man standing over the table, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, dressed too well to be staff himself. His eyes moved over me with open, unhidden contempt.

“You’re doing servant’s work now?” he said, and something in his tone suggested this was less a question than an accusation already half-formed.

I set down the fork I’d been polishing. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t,” he said, cutting me off before I could finish. “I know exactly who you are. Cassian.” He said his own name like it should mean something to me, like I should already understand the particular weight of his disapproval. “I’ve heard plenty about you, Elira. And I have to say, this—” he gestured at the basket of silver, at my plain clothes, at the whole scene “—is a nice touch. Very convincing.”

“I’m not sure what you think this is.”

“I think you’re trying very hard to look pitiful,” he said, voice low and hard, leaning in slightly. “Poor discarded daughter, forced to polish silver like a servant in the house that raised her. Very sympathetic. Very tragic.” His jaw tightened. “Except I know what you did to Selene. I know exactly what you’re capable of, and I’m not interested in whatever performance this is supposed to be.”

Something old and tired rose up in me — not quite anger, not exactly, but close enough to it that I felt my hands go still on the table.

“I picked up a basket of silver,” I said quietly. “That’s the entire performance.”

“Save it.” He straightened, looking down at me with the particular disgust of someone who’d already decided the verdict before hearing a single piece of evidence. “I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, coming back here and playing the martyr, but I’d be careful. Some of us aren’t as easily fooled as your brother.”

He turned and walked away before I could respond, disappearing into the crowded kitchen like a stone dropped into water, leaving ripples of something cold and unfamiliar behind him.

I sat there for a long moment, fork forgotten in my hand, staring at the space where he’d been standing.

Two years in that prison, and I’d thought I understood exactly how little the truth mattered to people who’d already decided what they wanted to believe. I thought I’d built enough armor around that particular wound to stop it from reaching anything vital.

Apparently I hadn’t built quite enough.

Because whoever Cassian was, whatever he thought he knew about me, one thing was clear in the hard line of his jaw and the certainty in his voice — he wasn’t going to be the last person in this house who looked at me and saw a villain already convicted, long before I ever had the chance to speak.

I picked the fork back up eventually, because my hands needed somewhere to go and the silver still needed polishing and nobody in this kitchen cared whether I finished the task with a steady heart or a cracked one. That, at least, was its own strange comfort. Nobody here was waiting to see how I’d react. Nobody here had already written the ending to my story before I’d said a single word.

I only wished the rest of the house extended me the same courtesy.