Chapter 4

Clarice's POV

Milo's face drained of color. He stumbled backward and hit his shoulder against the cabinet hard enough to rattle the glass inside.

"I..." Then, without warning, he lunged forward and threw his arms around me on the bed. "Clarice, I've regretted it every single day for four years! I still love you! Let's start over, please!"

He babbled his desperate apology into my hair, leaning down to force a kiss on me.

"Get off me! Don't touch me!" I screamed, twisting under his weight. But my body, hollowed out by the surgery, couldn't shift a grown man an inch.

The door was kicked open with a violent crash. Darius stood in the entrance, his eyes practically glowing with feral rage. He crossed the room in two strides, dragged Milo off me by the collar, and slammed a fist into his face. A second blow landed against his ribs with a sickening crunch. Milo flew into the corner, taking the IV stands down with him, glass raining across the floor.

Paloma ran in behind him and grabbed Darius's arm, her nails digging into his sleeve.

"Darius, stop! You'll kill him!" she wailed. "Clarice just wanted to see Milo one last time. They have history, they had a child together! You can't expect her to just forget him!" She sobbed, her voice trembling on cue, perfectly pitched. "But Clarice, you just miscarried. How could you be so reckless?"

Darius stopped. He turned to me, caught my wrist hard enough to bruise, and yanked me toward the edge of the bed.

"Clarice, do you have no shame?" he hissed, his chest heaving. "No wonder your sex tape was leaked for everyone to see."

My heart went cold. Slowly, I turned my head to look at Paloma.

No one else in the world knew about that tape except her and Milo.

"You told him," I said, my voice quiet but sharp enough to cut.

"I didn't mean to!" Paloma cried, tears streaming down her face in flawless lines. "Jonah got drunk and let it slip. I tried to stop him. I would never want to hurt you with this, Clarice!"

"You cried just like this four years ago," I said, watching her without blinking. "And every time you cry, I lose everything. My thesis. My boyfriend. My father. All of it went to you."

Her tears stopped for a fraction of a second—a cold, blank look crossing her face—before she remembered herself and resumed sobbing.

Milo pushed himself upright against the wall, wheezing through the pain. "Darius... you should look at the ring you gave her first."

The room went dead silent. Darius froze, his eyes locked on mine. He wasn't wondering if I knew. He was calculating when I had found out.

"You saw it," he whispered, his voice dropping to a low rumble.

I didn't answer. In the doorway, Beatrix stood frozen with her tray, barely breathing.

Then Darius dragged me off the bed, ignoring the blood still soaking through my gown. He hauled me down the hallway like a sack of sand, threw me into an abandoned ward at the end of the corridor, and locked the door behind us.

He gripped my jaw, forced it open, and poured a vial of bitter liquid down my throat. I coughed violently, bile and tears spilling down my face.

"This is the truth serum we use in the family for traitors," he said, his voice echoing off the bare walls, cold and inhuman. "Clarice, I want you to feel the agony I'm feeling."

The door slammed. The lock turned from the outside.

I curled up on the floor. The lights on the ceiling began to warp and spin, stretching into long white ribbons.

The hallucinations came in waves. I was back in the Sedgwick Lab, watching Milo and Paloma's bodies writhing together in the dark. Then the scene tore open and I was running through the alleys of Calder City, chased by shadows, the walls folding in on me.

Finally Darius appeared, holding the ring with Paloma's name engraved inside, laughing as he forced it onto my finger. His face warped into a monstrous grin.

No... I won't let him keep me. I won't back down.

The terror and the suffocating despair swallowed me whole.

My hand brushed something cold on the bottom shelf of a utility cart. Medical scissors. I closed my fingers around them, and I used them.

The hallucinations shattered. The world finally fell silent.

The scissors clattered to the floor, and I slipped into dark, icy unconsciousness.