Chapter 169: Face off
Mara let out a soft, trembling breath, the kind that felt like it had been lodged in her chest for a lifetime.
A year.
A whole year of swallowing pain sharp enough to cut through bone. A year of carrying the image of her baby, yanked from her body and thrown into flames, a memory so jagged it left her bleeding on the inside, unseen and unhealed.
That kind of pain... it doesn’t fade.
It rewrites you.
Turns the girl who loved too easily and forgave too much into a storm with no mercy.
Philip had paid for his sins. Paid in blood. But there was still another debt to be collected.
And tonight, she’d come to settle it.
Mara wiped the tears from her face, her expression hardening like cooling steel. She turned away from the closed door and the guards closing in, walking with unshaken steps down the long corridor. She moved like a ghost, weightless but deadly, toward the back of the estate — toward the space she’d spotted earlier. The one where Lucy and Caleb had been whispering, scheming, hiding.
She knew she’d find her there.
Lucy paced the room like a woman possessed, her pulse hammering in her ears. She wrung her hands, muttering under her breath.