Chapter 5
I always thought the secret Freya left behind would be something earth- shattering, something so shocking it would change everything.
Or maybe, I thought, Freya must have been consumed by hatred for something or someone-that’s why she died so resolutely, why her face twisted in terror in her final moments.
But the truth was nothing like I’d imagined. The secret was so ordinary.
So ordinary, in fact, you could hear it a hundred times just walking down any street.
Over a hundred thousand people in the livestream watched Lukas die, blood pouring from his mouth right before their eyes.
For a few seconds, the chat went completely silent. Then, as if on cue, it exploded in a frenzy
People took screenshots and recordings, desperate to capture the most explicit images they could, eager to use them as gossip fodder.
I sat there on the floor, tears streaming down my face. There was no time to mourn Lukas–my mind was racing, desperately trying to piece together the real reason his entire family had killed themselves.
That’s when the police burst in, shut down the livestream, and dragged me to my feet.
They roughly pulled me into a small room, and when I looked up, I saw Cruz’s stormy face glaring back at me.
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I froze, my face drained of color, and stammered, “Officer Lorne, Lukas killed himself. Everyone in the livestream saw it. It has nothing to do with me.”
Cruz clenched his jaw, his suspicion plain as day.
He took a deep breath, then suddenly snapped, grabbing me by the collar. “Evie Dunsley, are you really going to stand there and say this has nothing to do with you?
“I went to the hospital to check–there’s no record of you ever being a patient!”
My heart lurched. I stumbled back a few steps, stammering, “Officer Lorne, I’m not sick. Of course, there wouldn’t be any hospital records!”
I turned to run, but Cruz grabbed my arm in a fury and yanked me back. “Enough, Evie! You said you were pregnant; that’s why you came to meet Lukas’s family. Freya killed herself the moment she saw you were pregnant!
“But you never went to a doctor, never had a checkup. So tell me how can you be so sure you’re pregnant?
“Or was the pregnancy just an excuse? Was your real goal all along to drive Lukas’s entire family to their deaths?”
He jerked me so hard I nearly fell, clutching my stomach protectively to keep from getting hurt.
He claimed I wasn’t pregnant, and it was true that I’d never had a proper examination. But I knew–deep down, I knew–that a new life was growing inside me.
I was an orphan. An elder woman at the orphanage told me I’d been
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abandoned in a storm drain, found by a stranger while rats were gnawing at my belly. I wasn’t even three months old, but my stomach was strangely swollen, and I had a letter tucked into my clothes.
A kind soul brought me to the orphanage, where a doctor gave me a quick checkup. I never learned the results, but for as long as I could remember, the staff always looked at me with something like pity, as if there was something they couldn’t bring themselves to say.
When I got older, I begged the director to let me see the letter, hoping it would tell me who my birth parents were.
But the director told me she’d burned it, and that I should stay put in the orphanage, never even think about looking for my real family.
She was strict, forbidding me from having any contact with boys–not even the toddlers.
But every now and then, when she thought I wasn’t looking, I’d catch her gazing at me with a kind of helpless sympathy, as if I were some pitiful creature.
When I grew up and started to crave a life outside those walls, I begged her to let me leave. That’s when her pity would vanish, replaced by coldness. She’d tell me to shut up, that I was cursed, that anyone who got close to me would suffer.
She warned me, over and over, that I could never get pregnant—that any child I had would be a curse, too.
I always thought she was just trying to scare me.
But after I went home with Lukas, after Freya heard I was pregnant and immediately killed herself, after Lukas’s whole family died one after another–I started to wonder if maybe she was right.
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When I finally heard the secret from Lukas’s own lips, I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
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