Chapter 241
She had allies. She had secrets.
And tomorrow, she was going to war.
Sleep, when it finally came, was not a mercy. It was a trap.
I was back in the hospital. The smell of antiseptic was so strong I could taste it—metallic and sharp, like licking a battery. The lights overhead were blindingly bright, burning through my eyelids.
I couldn’t move. My arms were strapped down. My legs were heavy, numb.
“She’s hemorrhaging!” a voice shouted. “BP is dropping. Sixty over forty!”
I looked down. My stomach was torn open. Blood pooled on the white sheets, dark and thick. It wasn’t stopping. It was pouring out of me, taking my life with it.
“We need blood! Where is the blood?” the doctors screamed.
The door to the operating room swung open. A nurse rushed in, holding a cooler bag marked URGENT.
But then a figure stepped out from the shadows. She wore surgical scrubs, a mask covering the lower half of her face. But I knew those eyes. Doe-like. Innocent. Malicious.
Seraphina.
She bumped into the nurse. It looked accidental, clumsy. The cooler bag fell.
Crash.
The bags of blood inside burst upon impact with the hard tile floor. Crimson liquid splattered across Seraphina’s white shoes. The monitor flatlined.
Beeeeeeep.
Seraphina pulled down her mask. She wasn’t smiling. She looked bored.
She leaned over me, her breath smelling of peppermint and rot.
“Your blood type is Rh-negative, Skye,” she whispered, her voice echoing in my skull. “Panda blood. So rare. The hospital only had two units. And oops… I just spilled them.”
She reached out, her fingers cold and sticky. She grabbed my left hand. She didn’t hold it. She yanked the Sterling family ring off my finger, tearing the skin.
“Such a waste,” she sighed. “You dying like this. But don’t worry. I’ll take good care of Liam.”
The coldness spread from my stomach to my chest. My vision tunneled. The last thing I saw was her putting my ring on her finger.
“No!”
𝖱𝘦𝗰о𝘮m𝘦𝘯𝗱 𝘣𝘦𝗹n𝗼𝗏е𝘭s.c𝗈𝗺 𝘵𝗈 𝘆𝘰𝘂𝗿 f𝘳і𝖾𝘯𝗱𝘴
I sat up in bed, a scream tearing from my throat.
My chest heaved. I was drenched in sweat, my nightgown clinging to my skin like a shroud. Sunlight streamed through the heavy curtains of the Vance guest room, dust motes dancing in the beams.
It was morning. I was alive.
But the coldness… the coldness was still there.
I scrambled out of bed, my legs tangling in the sheets. I ran to the bathroom and turned on the tap, splashing freezing water on my face. I stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were wild, pupils dilated.
Rh-negative.
In my past life, the doctors had called it a tragic accident. A supply shortage. A clumsy nurse.
But Seraphina had been there. She had been “volunteering” at that hospital to improve her public image.
I ran back to the bedroom and grabbed my laptop. I sat on the floor, ignoring the cold marble, and began to type. My fingers flew across the keys, accessing the hospital’s archived personnel logs. I bypassed the firewall with the ease of someone who had learned to survive in the shadows.
Search: Seraphina Miller. Volunteer roster. Shift logs.
I filtered by date—not today’s date, but the date of the accident in my memories. The timeline had changed, but her patterns hadn’t. I cross-referenced her volunteer schedule with the blood bank inventory logs from that same period.