Chapter 0005

•ISOLDE•

I could hear Sylvan crying, but I was losing a lot of blood and couldn't even reach out to him. My hands and feet were weakening.

"Sylvan." His name came out as barely a sound. I tried to lift my hand toward him, but I couldn't.

"Caleb," I muttered. "Please." My lips were going numb. "Take care of him. He's your son. Whatever I did to deserve this, he did nothing. He is innocent. Please take care of him."

"How sad," Talia chuckled. "I told you that Caleb is mine. So, die Bitch."

"You never even deserved to be a mother," Caleb sneered, taking Sylvan from me. "He will grow up knowing that Talia birthed him, and not a blind whore."

I turned my cheek against the floor and looked at the side door I had almost reached. And I thought of Edan who would wait out there for me and not know I was already gone.

The garden beyond was just visible, the stone path, the rosebushes I had planted with my own hands three months before Sylvan was born.

I had planned to plant more in the spring.

Sylvan's cries began to soften, and I didn't know if it was because he had quieted or because I was no longer able to hear them properly.

I closed my eyes and took my last breath.

•••

My eyes stung when I opened them to the sickening sunlight. And then I heard a siren, and beneath that, a voice, repeating my name.

"Isolde. Isolde, stay with me. Keep your eyes open. We're almost there."

I knew that voice. I had known it my entire life.

"Uncle Titus."

My own voice came out cracked and strange, scraping through a throat that felt entirely unprepared to be used.

I opened my eyes and the world swam. I was in the back seat of a moving car. The sun was almost setting.

"She's conscious." Titus reached back from the front seat and gripped my hand with both of his. "Isolde, listen to me. You were hit. A car ran a red light and struck us on your side. I need you to stay awake until we reach the hospital. Can you do that for me?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again.

I looked down at my hands. They were unmarked. There was no blood, and no knife wound.

My coat was torn at the shoulder and my left palm was scraped, but there was no hole in my side, and no floor against my cheek.

"What day is it?" I whispered.

"What?"

"What day is it, Uncle Titus? What is today?"

"7th of July. 2023."

I lay back against the seat and stared at the ceiling of the car and breathed.

It was two years ago, two years before the marriage, the pregnancy, the nursery, and the hearing aids.

Before any of it.

"The people who hit us," Titus added. "Drove off without stopping, but I have their plates. I will find them. I will find every last one of them, and they will answer for this. Do you hear me?"

"Yes," I answered.

The hospital arrived in a blur. There were rushing figures and hands that moved me from one surface to another.

I answered all their questions, gave them my name, nodded when nodded at, and all the while my chest tightened, wondering if this was all a dream.

Thirty minutes after they settled me into a bay and finished their initial examination, the curtain moved.

Caleb walked in.

I had forgotten, in the disorientation of waking, that this version of him still existed.

This Caleb was twenty-eight years old, and he looked worried, his eyes moved over me with an expression that I had once believed was love.

He leaned over and took my face in his hands.

"God," he breathed. "Isolde. I came as fast as I could. Are you alright? Tell me where it hurts."

I looked at him.

I looked at the hands cupping my face, the same hands that had, in another life I could still feel inside my body, held a knife.

"I'm alright," I answered.

Titus stood near the wall with his arms folded, watching Caleb, but said nothing.

Twenty minutes after Caleb, Talia arrived.

She burst through the curtain with her eyes wide and her handbag clutched to her chest, and she went straight to my bedside and gripped my free hand in both of hers.

"Isa," she breathed. "I came the moment I heard. I was terrified. Don't ever do that to me again."

I looked at her face. At the crease between her brows and the shine at the corners of her eyes that looked entirely, convincingly real.

She had told me I deserved a peaceful death when it came, and she had laughed while I bled out on the floor.

"I'm fine," I murmured, swallowing.

She squeezed my hand, and I didn't pull away.

Caleb sat on the edge of my bed and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead, and spoke softly. "The engagement party has been postponed. Obviously. I've already spoken to the venue's organizers."

Talia nodded in agreement from the other side of the bed.

"But everyone wants to celebrate you," he continued. "So I'll reach out to the guests tonight and let them know we'll move it to tomorrow. You'll feel stronger by then." He pressed a kiss to my forehead. "I'll make sure of it."

I let him.

I sat between the two people who would one day destroy me, who were looking at me now with faces full of concern, and I let them hold my hands and smooth my hair.

I was alive, and this time, I would not waste a single moment of it. They would pay for my death.