She thinks she’s safe in Happiness.
She thinks she’s safe.
She’s wrong. Wrong. WRONG.
Soon she’ll come home, and then we’ll finally be free.
Home.
This place. This nightmare. She thinks this is my home.
“Oh God,” I whisper, my knees buckling. I cover my mouth, as if I can keep the trauma in my head from spilling out and making this real.
Valen catches me before I hit the floor, his arms wrapping around me so tightly I can barely breathe, but I don’t care. I need his pressure. Need to feel contained. Need to know I’m not going to fly apart into a thousand pieces.
“Chief,” Valen bellows, his voice cracking. “Get Roman.”
Behind me, Chief sucks in a whistling breath before the sound of him shuffling out of the room is all I can focus on.
Then I stop listening altogether because my gaze snags on one photo in particular.
It’s of Valen and me at the Happiness town fair. This must be the moment right after I fainted. My head is tilted back, and I’m staring at him as if he’s an angel. He’s wearing an expression that makes my heart ache even now because there’s no recognition in his beautiful blue eyes.
She took this photo. She violated the very safety she helped create.
Miriam. It has to be her.
“Oh, fuck.” Valen steps forward, almost as if he forgot he was still holding me because he drags me with him.
That’s when I see it. Something morbid and too disturbing to be real.
“V—Valen. What is that?” I wrench out of his hold and practically fall into the wall.
Two women. Same DNA. One standing. One on the ground with unseeing eyes.
“Jesus Christ. Is that…is that Terra or Miriam?” His voice is deadly calm, low, dangerous.
“She’s alive.” The words leave my mouth, but they sound so flat, so dead, that I don’t recognize them as my own. “Terra’s alive. She’s been alive this whole time. She killed her own sister. She took her place, and she’s been watching me for months. Maybe longer.”
Shock numbs me, thankfully.
“We don’t know that yet,” Valen says.
“Look at the walls, Valen!” My voice cracks when anger and fear creep in. “Look at them! Miriam wouldn’t do this. My gut has been saying that this entire time, and I didn’t listen. The woman I knew—the womanweknew—she wouldn’t do this. But Terra? That miserable bitch would. She’s the only one who would care this much about making us suffer. I was her darkest obsession, Valen. It has to be her. It has to be.”
He doesn’t speak because there’s nothing to say. Without his memories to back me up, I’m on my own in my certainty, and I have to make him see that I’m right.
It means I force myself to take in every detail of the room, even though every instinct I’ve honed over the years is telling me to run, to hide, to keep myself safe.
Now I know safety is an illusion my mind created because I wasn’t strong enough to fight back.
My gaze drifts to Valen.
Today, I’m strong. Today, I stop hiding.
I shift to the desk in the corner. It’s small, metal, institutional. The kind you’d see in a prison. On it are more papers. More notes. But beside it, stuffed into a shadowy corner, is something else.
A dress. It’s white lace—Terra’s favorite—and the old-fashioned style hangs on the dirty dress form like a ghost.
