Chapter 3: Seven Years Back

Celine’s POV

I opened my eyes and everything was wrong.

The terrible, blinding pain was completely gone. No hot blood dripping down my face. No broken bones piercing my skin. No hard, cold asphalt scraping under my back.

I was sitting right in the back seat of a car. A very familiar car. I smelled the heavy, sweet scent of Lucia's expensive perfume hanging in the cool air. I heard the quiet, smooth hum of the big engine driving on a long highway. Black leather seats pressed cold against my bare legs.

And sitting next to me, with wet tears rolling down her soft cheeks like some abandoned little kitten, was Jia.

I went completely still. My heart stopped in my chest.

She looked so much younger. Her face was softer, rounder at the cheeks. Her dark hair was shorter, falling just past her small shoulders. And she was wearing the exact same cheap, faded cotton dress she wore the day the Blackwood family brought her home for the very first time.

My stomach dropped so hard I thought I was going to be sick all over the clean leather seats.

This was seven years ago.

This was the exact day Enzo and Lucia drove out to that little, dirty town upstate to collect their "lost" biological daughter. They were bringing her back to the massive Blackwood estate. I was only nineteen years old today. I sat in this exact seat, in this exact car, and I held Jia's hand and told her everything was going to be perfectly okay.

I died. I know I died. I felt my lungs fill with blood. I felt my heart stop beating on that dirty street. So how am I sitting here right now?

I looked down at my shaking hands. Smooth skin. No ugly white scars. The small, round burn mark I got two years from now at a messy family barbecue was completely missing. My fingernails were bitten short, exactly the way I used to keep them when I was stressing over my college exams.

This is real. This isn't some crazy dream before death. I went back in time.

"Celine?" Jia sniffled beside me.

Her big brown eyes were swimming with fresh tears. She looked at me with total innocence.

"Are you okay? You were staring out the dark window for so long. You look very pale."

I stared at her face. I didn't say a single word.

Lucia turned around from the front passenger seat. Her eyes were sharp and cold when they looked at me.

"Celine, answer your sister. Do not be rude to her on her first day."

"I am fine, Mother," I said. My voice sounded thin and raspy. "I just woke up from a nap."

"Well, be polite. Jia has had a very long and emotional day," Lucia snapped, before turning her warm smile back to Jia. "Are you hungry, my sweet girl? We can stop anywhere you want."

"I am okay, ma'am," Jia whispered.

"No, call me Mom," Lucia insisted. "You are home now."

"I hope you're not upset about me coming to live with you, Celine," Jia said softly.

She reached her arm out across the wide leather seat. She reached for my hand.

Every single cell in my body screamed. I wanted to reach across the seat. I wanted to wrap my fingers tight around her small throat and squeeze until her fake, innocent eyes popped out of her skull. I wanted to smash her head against the window until the glass broke.

But I didn't move an inch.

I looked at her crying face. I looked at those practiced, perfectly trembling lips. I watched the way she hunched her small shoulders forward to make herself look even smaller, weaker, and more pitiful.

And I smiled. A wide, bright smile.

Not yet. You don't get to die quick and easy, Jia. When I am totally done with you, you are going to wish I had killed you in this car today. I am going to ruin you slowly.

"I'm fine," I said smoothly. I pulled my hand back gently before she could touch my skin. "Just thinking."

"What are you thinking about?" Jia asked, tilting her head.

"Just thinking about how much fun we are going to have together," I whispered. I leaned slightly closer to her. "We are going to share so many secrets."

"I want you to know," she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, "I'm not here to take anything from you. I just want to know my real parents. That's all I want."

"Of course," I said.

"You'll always be their daughter too, Celine. I would never try to replace you."

God, she was so good at this game. The shaking, weak voice. The wide, honest eyes. The gentle way she touched her chest right over her heart like it was hurting her to speak.

In my first life, I fell for every single word that dropped from her lying mouth. I held her tight in this car while she cried. When we got home, I gave her my best clothes, my expensive jewelry, my closest friends. I stepped aside into the dark shadows so she could shine in the bright light, because I truly thought she deserved it more than me.

What a stupid, blind fool I was.

Because this time, I was really looking at her. And what I saw told a very different story.

I looked down at her hands resting in her lap. They were soft and smooth as pure silk. Her nails were perfectly shaped. Not a single hard callous on her palms. Not a single rough patch of skin on her knuckles.

This was supposed to be a poor girl who grew up in total dirt. A girl who washed greasy dishes and scrubbed hard floors on her knees since she was old enough to hold a wet sponge. But her delicate fingers looked like they had never touched anything harder or dirtier than shiny piano keys.

And speaking of the piano, a sharp memory hit my brain.

"Do you like music, Jia?" I asked quietly, cutting through the silence of the car.

"What?" Jia blinked. "Yes. I like listening to the radio."

"We have a massive grand piano in the living room," I told her, keeping my voice low and teasing. "I bet you would look beautiful playing it."

"I don't know how to play," Jia said quickly. "We were too poor to afford lessons."

"Oh, I am sure you will pick it up fast. You seem like a girl with many hidden talents."

Jia stared at me. Her fake tears stopped completely for one second. A fast flash of total confusion crossed her dark eyes.

I leaned back against the seat and smiled out the window. I remembered now. Within her very first week at the big Blackwood estate, Jia sat down at that grand piano in the living room. She played a classical piece so fast and complicated that Lucia actually cried tears of joy. Jia said the music was just "self-taught." Then came the difficult chess games, the perfect ballroom dancing, the beautiful oil painting. All "natural talent," she claimed with a shy smile.

A poor girl raised in dirty poverty does not learn to play classical piano by accident.

Then my mind shifted to the timing. The sick, twisted timing of it all.

Don Vittorio, my fierce grandfather. He was the absolute only person in that entire house who truly loved me. He was the only one who protected me. He died on a rainy Tuesday.

Exactly two weeks later, Enzo walked into the dining room and announced that they had finally found their lost biological daughter. Two weeks. After years of supposedly searching for her with expensive private detectives, they magically found her in two weeks.

Right after the one man protecting me was put in the ground.

My grandfather's death. Jia's sudden appearance. The video scandal. My murder on that street.

It was all connected. It was all planned, maybe from the very beginning.

I turned and looked out the window at the highway stretching ahead of us, and I let the rage settle into something colder, quieter, and far more dangerous.

Seven years. They spent seven years tearing my life apart piece by piece, and I smiled through every second of it because I was too blind and too grateful to see the knife in their hands.

Not this time.

This time, I was going to find out exactly why the Blackwood family needed me gone so badly. And then I was going to make every single one of them pay.