All Chapters of A LOVE LIKE OURS: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

They drove in silence for hours.The sky behind them was streaked with smoke—remnants of the house they’d set ablaze, the vault they’d sealed, the lineage they’d tried to burn to ash. But the fire hadn’t ended anything. Not really.Yvette watched Cara in the rearview mirror, curled beneath a blanket, eyes closed but twitching in her sleep. Not nightmares. Not anymore.Now… dreams. Symbols. Whispers.Tristan drove without music, without distraction, as if the silence was a barrier they couldn’t afford to lower. His jaw clenched so tightly that Yvette wondered if he was grinding memories between his teeth.“Where are we going?” she finally asked.He didn’t look at her. “To a place I hoped I’d never use again.”---The safehouse wasn’t a house.It was a bunker. Built into the cliffs above a frozen lake, hidden beneath moss-covered rock and a fake fishing shack. The air was sharp, alpine-cold. Pines leaned in close, whispering in wind language. The kind of place where things went to sleep

Yvette’s breath caught in her throat.“Through me?”Cara’s voice had changed. It wasn’t her usual soft cadence. It was distant—like the echo of someone else speaking through a tunnel of time.Tristan moved slowly toward the child. “Yvette, don’t touch her yet. He’s… close.”Yvette ignored him and dropped to her knees beside the bed. “Cara, sweetheart, listen to me. Whatever you’re hearing, whatever you’re feeling—it’s not real. It’s not you.”Cara turned her head, eyes locking onto Yvette’s. There was something unnatural about them. The irises shimmered like oil on water—dark, shifting, depthless.“He showed me,” she whispered. “He said you’re the door. He just needs to step through you, and everything will begin again. Better this time. He said you were made for it.”“No.” Yvette shook her head, voice trembling. “No one made me.”“You’re not Elise’s.”Yvette felt her chest split.Tristan stepped forward. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”Cara blinked, and the strange shimmer disa

Yvette stared at him.Tristan. Chained. Bleeding. Still alive.And smiling like a man who had already said goodbye.“You can’t be serious,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “There has to be another way.”“There’s not,” he said calmly. “I’ve looked. Elise looked. Your mother tried. But once the echo roots in both vessels, the only way to silence it is to sever the source.”“You’re not the source.”“I was made to be. As your mirror. Your twin in the ritual. We were designed to balance each other. You carry Elias’s voice. I carry his memory.”He looked up at her, and for the first time in weeks, Yvette saw the boy she used to know—before the Network, before the bloodlines, before the secrets.“If I stay alive, he has a path back. A thread. If you let me go…” He paused. “You could finally be free.”---But the thought of killing him made her soul crack.She stumbled back, breath uneven. “You’re asking me to become like them.”“I’m asking you to end them.”Tristan’s voice broke. “Yvette

The mirror’s surface shimmered like a restless sea, its fractured edges now mysteriously whole. Yvette’s breath caught as the reflection inside shifted—no longer just her face, but a flicker of something else, something dark and familiar.Her fingers hovered, trembling, over the glass. The silence in the room was deafening, broken only by the faint whisper of a voice she thought she’d buried deep inside herself.“Yvette…”The name echoed in the hollow space, as if carried on the cold wind itself.She spun around, heart hammering, but the room was empty. Or so it seemed.Behind her, shadows curled into shapes — twisting, alive, reaching.Tristan’s voice came from the doorway, low and urgent. “We don’t have much time. The Network is closing in.”Yvette nodded, forcing calm into her voice. “Cara… she’s gone. And this mirror—it’s not just glass anymore.”Tristan’s eyes darkened. “It’s a gateway. We need to find out what it’s keeping before it’s too late.”But what the mirror kept, Yvette

The gravel crunched beneath the tires as the car wound up the road, the familiar sharp turns and unspoken dread settling deeper with every mile. Fog pressed thick against the windshield, curling like fingers across the glass, obscuring what lay ahead—though Yvette already knew.They were going home.Or what was left of it.The ancestral estate sat just beyond the tree line, shrouded in ivy and decay, as if time itself had tried to bury it. The windows stared out like hollowed eyes. The front gate hung from one rusted hinge, and the path that once gleamed white with crushed stone now looked like a scar leading into the woods.No one spoke as Tristan killed the engine. Cara, nestled between them, stirred but didn’t wake.“She’s been dreaming the whole way,” Yvette murmured. “Smiling.”“She hasn’t smiled like that since the mirror came back,” Tristan said darkly. “That’s not comfort. That’s invitation.”Yvette stared at the house. Her throat closed around old dust and deeper memories. “I