“She wants me to have her baby?” I asked, barely able to speak.
Magnus took my hands like he was trying to calm me down. “Not hers. Ours. Think about it—”
“No,” I snapped. “Don’t twist it.”
He leaned closer, eyes intense. “Lyra, please. She’s your friend. She’s always been good to you. Just help her. Once she’s gone, everything goes back to how it was supposed to be.”
I didn’t understand how someone could say something so cruel with such a calm face.
But he kept pushing.
“Ariel will leave,” he swore. “And then we’ll marry. The children will be ours. You’ll raise them. You’ll finally have everything you were promised.”
I hesitated.
And then, like the idiot I was, I let him convince me.
I carried the twins for them.
I gave up my body, my pride, my peace—because I thought it was the last ugly step before the life I was owed finally began.
But I never even got the chance to hand those babies over.
Ariel died before I gave birth.
Another “accident.”
Another tragedy.
And Magnus—wrecked by grief, shattered by guilt—looked at me like I was the only thing left in his world that could hold it together.
He begged me to stay.
He begged me to raise them.
So I did.
I gave birth to two boys. And instead of becoming the woman beside Magnus, I became the woman cleaning up the mess of his dead wife.
Two years passed.
Magnus still didn’t marry me.
When I asked him why, he looked at me like I was unreasonable.
“How do you think it’ll look?” he said. “People will say I’m celebrating Ariel’s death.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“But I’m the one you were meant to be with,” I said, my voice shaking. “I’m the one you promised.”
Magnus’ face hardened. “That doesn’t matter anymore. Focus on the boys. Marriage can come later.”
Later.
Always later.
So I poured myself into raising the twins. I tried to love them enough for two mothers. I tried to be patient, gentle, steady.
But it didn’t matter what I did.
They hated me.
They clung to Elara—the nanny—as if she was their real mother, and they treated me like the villain in their bedtime stories.
To them, I wasn’t the woman who carried them.
I was the woman who “stole” their mother’s place.
The woman who “killed” Ariel.
Eleven years.
Eleven years of swallowing insults, cruelty, cold stares, and whispered accusations.
And today?
Today, I finally hit the end of whatever was left inside me.
I was done waiting for them to love me.
Done begging for scraps of kindness.