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“You seem to have lost your mind,” Grace snapped, finally daring to look at me again.

Good that I still existed, even though I would have liked to disappear.

“If you only knew how much you sound like your mother now,” I blurted out, and for a moment I thought I had thrown Grace off balance. For a moment...

“There was a time when I would have avoided that at all costs. But now I understand her.”

She was like her mother. If she knew that Amara had been part of something forbidden, how would she react?

“What you're doing is just wrong and sick, Julie!”

Wrong and sick. So that was what I was to her now?

Unconsciously, I took a step back toward the living room area.

How could she be so blind to the truth?

“She's right. You're not one of us. Maybe on paper, but everyone knows whose daughter you are.”

I turned my head to the left, where Vivienna had appeared on the stairs, her two sidekicks beside her.

She strode straight toward me, while her friends kept their usual safe distance.

Amber crossed her arms in front of her chest, leaning against the wall.

“You should be careful not to go crazy like him,” Vivienna laughed, her pretty face looking ugly.

She stopped a meter in front of me and looked down at me condescendingly.

“I heard he killed someone too.”

The shock hit me unexpectedly.

“No...” I whispered, desperately hoping he had been better than me, but she continued to smirk at me.

“The fact that you're his daughter seems to bother Gloria immensely.”

She took one of my strands between her long fingers, as she had always done when I used to have long hair. But the strand slipped from her hands. For a moment, she stared at my hair. Finally, her gaze slid to my eyes.

“And yet it gave you the special ticket to everything.”

Vivienna looked at my belly with a bitter smile, then back into my eyes.

Her index finger wandered further down, across my neck, my sternum...

That was the line. I stepped back. Avoided her gaze.

“You and your baby, you will go down without mercy,” she snorted, and I felt that cool feeling in my hands again. Ice. It was ready to defend me and my child. “Good thing they plan to take it away from you.”

Distress. That was all I could feel. It had taken on a life of its own and ran across my skin in the form of fine ice crystals.

“How could you be so stupid and get yourself pregnant?” Amber laughed in the background.

“Just like your simple-minded mother,” Vivienna hissed, her eyes narrowed. “You two have more in common than you think.”

I couldn’t stop it anymore. No matter how hard I tried, the destruction... It shot through my veins. Unstoppable.

“Aw, let me guess, you don't like that comparison at all?”