Another strike. Another. I couldn’t hear properly anymore. Everything rang. I forced my eyes open. I saw Drake and Jakobi talking, mouths moving, but I couldn’t hear the words. Then Jakobi nodded.
Drake picked Chiara up, held her close, and turned away. He walked off without even looking back. Not once. A laugh slipped out of me, weak and shaking.
“Ha… so this is it…” Ninety-nine lashes, and somehow none of them hurt as much as that moment.
The sky turned red as the sun set, like the world was bleeding with me. Something soft landed on me, a white seabird, its feathers turning red instantly.
“Drake…” I whispered, “Your fate… your bond… all those things you said… they meant nothing, didn’t they?” I tried to breathe but it hurts. Everything hurts. “If there’s another life… I won’t love you again.”
Then darkness swallowed everything.
I don’t know how long it has been. When I woke again, there were sirens, people shouting, hands moving around me. They said I was lucky. They said I survived. I didn’t feel lucky.
At the hospital, they treated my wounds and told me to stay, but I refused. What was the point? I went back to the glass house alone.
The place he built for me, every detail made just to make me smile. Now it didn’t feel like mine anymore. Chiara had only been there for two months, but she was everywhere. Her clothes, her scent, her things filling spaces that used to be mine.
My dressing room was a mess, my music room filled with her stuff like I’d never existed. Even the wooden carving I made for him, the one he once held like it meant everything, was lying on the floor, crooked and forgotten. I stared at it for a long time. Did he really cry back then… or was that fake too?
Outside, the sky was completely dark. A whole day and night had passed, and he never came back. Of course he didn’t. He was with her.
I smiled a little, but it felt empty. I wiped the blood from my lips slowly, then took out the papers I prepared and placed them inside the mailbox at the front of the glass house.
The first thing I grabbed was the test report from that cursed bouquet Chiara gave me yesterday.
I opened it slowly, my fingers trembling, and my chest ached like someone had slammed a fist into it.