The Fire.

Selena's POV

The fire was crawling down the corridor toward me. I could smell my own hair burning.

Mental Health Facility, third floor, Ward C. Every security door was locked. This wasn't an accident.

My fingers clawed at the lock, two nails already torn off. Blood mixed with sweat dripped down my hands. I had screamed. I had pounded on the door. No one came.

I collapsed to my knees. Smoke choked into my lungs, my throat raw and hoarse. I didn't want to die. I was only twenty-four years old. I was Selena Windsor, heiress to Windsor Jewelers—no, they didn't let me use that title anymore.

They said I was a drug addict. They said I slept around. They said I was mentally unstable.

They locked me in here for three whole months.

Now I had no strength left to scream. My body was flooded with whatever drugs they'd injected into me at some point, and they were doing their job. My thoughts grew sluggish, my limbs heavier and heavier.

It was Vera and Lillian. My perpetually gentle and kind stepmother and stepsister. Their faces surfaced in my chaotic memories, wearing those perfect, impeccable smiles.

I remembered a family dinner once, when I had zoned out at the table and my father Richard Windsor's expression instantly darkened.

"Selena, didn't that expensive boarding school teach you to pay attention?" His voice always made me feel small.

I was at a loss for words when Vera's hand gently covered the back of my father's hand, her voice soft as velvet. "Darling, don't be so hard on her. She's just a child—she must be tired from school today."

She turned to me, her eyes full of loving concern, as if to say, "Mom's here, don't be afraid." Back then, I treasured that protection, thinking it was the only warmth I had after my mother died. I didn't know that behind that smile was a calculated plan to drag me into hell.

And then there was Lillian. She was always my "accomplice."

"You're going to Chloe's party?" She would pull me close, whispering conspiratorially in my ear. "Go ahead, I'll cover for you. If Dad asks, I'll tell him you have a headache and you're sleeping in your room. He'll never come upstairs to check."

As she spoke, she would stuff my favorite black leather jacket—the one my father had expressly forbidden me to wear—into my arms, winking playfully at me. "Go have fun and come back quick, my queen."

I thought it was sisterly solidarity and affection. Now I understood that every "forbidden item" she handed me, every lie she told to "cover" for me, was another brick paving my road to becoming the "wastrel heiress." Step by step, they pushed me toward the cliff of indulgence and rebellion, all while playing the role of my only protectors.

Until three months ago, that catastrophic confrontation.

I burst into my father's study like a madwoman, clutching a blurry photo I'd taken of Lillian making some kind of exchange with a strange man. "It's them! Dad, they're the ones destroying me!" I screamed, slamming the photo onto his desk.

Vera's face immediately went white, tears welling up in her eyes as she swayed unsteadily against Lillian. "Selena, how can you say such things... we love you so much..."

Lillian supported her, looking at me with wounded eyes. "Selena, I know you've been under a lot of stress lately, but you can't just accuse us like this without any basis..."

I rushed to my father, grabbing his arm. "You have to believe me! You have to! They've been lying to you all along!"

My father's gaze didn't fall on me.

He was looking at another pile of things on the desk—fabricated photos that had appeared from nowhere showing me in intimate poses with different men, along with a test report indicating the presence of drugs in my system.

Slowly, one by one, he pried my fingers off his arm. With an irresistible finality.

"I am so disappointed in you, Selena."

He finally spoke, his voice a dead, frozen wasteland. He didn't even deem me worthy of his anger. He looked at me without any warmth, and that gaze cut deep.

"Since your mother died, I've given you everything. This is how you repay me?" He didn't even give me a chance to defend myself, just wearily waved his hand at the two men in white coats standing by the door. "Take her away. Put her where she belongs."

Drug addiction, mental instability, promiscuity. He barely hesitated before deciding this was who his daughter was.

He turned his back to me and never looked at me again.

That silent, cold, rigid back was the last thing I saw as I was dragged out of the house.

The fire was still spreading. The pain of my skin burning snapped me out of my memories.

No one was coming to open the door. I couldn't move. The path to survival had been cut off.

It was all too late. I regretted everything. Death's footsteps drew closer and closer.

My rapidly fading consciousness, accompanied by bone-deep pain, left me in despair.

Maybe this was the ending I deserved. A woman abandoned by everyone, dying in an "accidental" fire. No investigation, no one caring. The Upper East Side would probably sigh and say "we saw it coming," then raise their glasses to celebrate one less troublemaker on next season's dinner party lists.

The pathetic end of a disowned heiress.

Just as I was about to surrender and collapse, I heard a tremendous crash. Something was being forcibly broken open, followed by urgent, determined footsteps.

Through my scorched eyes, I saw the tall silhouette of a man.

His face was etched with anxiety in the flickering firelight. He was running toward me.

As if I were someone important to him.

Damian Cross. The Windsor family's outside counsel.

Why him?

I searched through my hazy memories for any connection with Damian. He had come to the house a few times before to handle trust documents. I had never really looked at him properly.

I had once overheard him say to his assistant, "Selena is just a spoiled heiress. What a waste."

And now, this man who had made such a judgment about me was reaching down to lift me into his arms.

His embrace was broad and strong—this was the last thing I felt before losing consciousness.

When I regained awareness, the sharp smell of disinfectant and the beeping of machines reminded me I was in a hospital.

I was alive. But my broken, heavy body told me I wouldn't be for much longer.

Every breath felt like swallowing shattered glass, the burning pain radiating from my chest to the tips of my limbs. I couldn't open my eyes, but my ears still worked.

I heard a nurse sigh as she changed my dressings. "Poor girl. Her father's assistant said he's at some crucial meeting in Europe and can't be reached at all."

A meeting. More important than his dying daughter. My heart turned to ice. Compared to this, the physical pain I'd suffered in that scorching fire seemed like nothing.

Soon after, I heard the sound of high heels. Someone had arrived, one after another, stopping beside my hospital bed.

"How pitiful, wrapped up so tightly like that. There's probably not an inch of good skin left on her body." Lillian's voice, dripping with disgust. This was completely different from the fawning tone she used to use with me.

"Still, seeing her like this, I'm so hap—" She couldn't contain herself, continuing to chatter, her schadenfreude barely concealed.

Vera cut her off sharply. "Shut up, Lillian! Watch where you are!"

But immediately her tone softened, even taking on a lazy quality. "Though there's nothing to worry about now. The doctor said she won't last two days. It's just a pity—she was supposed to stay in there for a few more years. Who knew the sanatorium's electrical system would malfunction."

This woman's transformations were so seamless. I must have been blind all these years.

"Poor child, life is full of accidents, just like her mother."

Accidents. Mother? Could it be that Vera had killed my mother too? Though I had no concrete evidence, I was almost immediately certain in my heart. Nothing was impossible—if she could frame me, create "accidents" for me, then Mother's death couldn't have been an accident either.

My heart trembled violently. Vera, you deserve to die!

"Mom, what happens now? If she dies, what about the trust?"

"After death is confirmed, the trust assets automatically pass to the secondary beneficiary."

"The second in line is me." Lillian's voice was light and cheerful, filled with the joy of getting what she wanted. "Right, Mom? Dad already signed the amendment documents."

"He did. He didn't even hesitate." Vera's tone was triumphant. "After all, he's long run out of patience with that woman's worthless daughter."

Worthless daughter. She was talking about me.

Lillian laughed. "Dad's so good to me."

"Of course, darling. You're his biological daughter." As Vera said this, she was already walking out, her voice growing faint and distant.

I used every remaining shred of consciousness to catch those words.

Biological daughter. My heart trembled once more. Biological daughter—Lillian was Dad's biological daughter. And what about me? I was only a year older than Lillian. Just one year.

What did that mean? It meant that within the first year after I was born, my father was already in another woman's bed. It meant that when he held me as an infant, in another city's delivery room, he had also held another baby.

No wonder he was always so warm with Lillian while remaining stern and distant with me. I used to think it was the strictness he reserved for his biological daughter. He didn't love my mother, and so he didn't love the child my mother bore. His heart had been divided all along.

How ridiculous that all these years I kept trying to please him, only to earn the indifference of a liar.

I wasn't even sure what role he played in Vera's conspiracy. My mother's death, the trust manipulation, my psychiatric evaluation—how much of it did he participate in?