CHAPTER 30
MIA
I should have learned from my mistakes.
Following people never leads to anything good.
But maybe I blame Zane for teaching me how to drive—both cars and motorcycles—because now my skills let me go further than I should, even if it means torturing someone in the process.
I took Zane's bike. He hardly ever uses it, and it was a shock when I found it in his garage.
I know he's probably going to be irritated—I get that he has a certain attachment to the motorcycle for reasons I don’t particularly care to understand.
Finally, I pull my phone from my pocket and answer a message from Liv and another from Audrey.
I was a bit taken aback when I found out Audrey’s last name was Ross. But what really threw me off was realizing my brother, a former Riviera, is somehow tangled up with her. I got why he's so defensive when I mentioned her—it makes sense.
I also found out that Liv and Andi are part of TSOC, while Audrey’s just an Evermore.
Honestly, I’m kind of grateful I found this out after everything was cleared up. Can you imagine trying to keep up a friendship with people who are on the same side that hurt my brother? That would've been...awkward, to say the least. Guess I dodged that bullet.
Oh, and that’s why Andi knew my name. I was listed in Zane’s file, part of his protocols after he... ran me over.
Her clan keeps track of members, and I guess I just got caught up in all the chaos. Everything finally made sense when she explained it, though I couldn't help but feel like I was in some spy thriller.
I reply to Liv about the photo of her in London with Andi, then open Audrey’s message—only to realize it’s not Audrey. It’s my idiot brother.
Audrey: Don’t send me any more messages.
Mia: You’re going to have to try harder than that, One.
Audrey: At least you’re not completely stupid. I smirk. My brother is something else.
I smirk. My brother is something else.
Still, it’s ironic to see someone with the last name Riviera and a Ross together. It reminds me of that one movie— Romeo and Juliet. Anyway, I’m distracting myself too much. I need to focus.
The alley is dark and reeks of garbage and urine. I press myself against the rough concrete wall, watching the scene unfold in front of me.
Carter is cornered, his body tense, facing three men who clearly aren’t here to chat. The biggest one, a brute with tattoos scattered across his neck, speaks impatiently.
"Did you bring our money?"
Carter hesitates. I know that tone. He’s trying to stay calm, trying to find an escape with words, but even he can’t talk his way out of this.
"I just… I need more time."
The slap comes before he can even finish the sentence. The sharp crack echoes through the alley, and Carter stumbles back, clutching his face.
"Time doesn’t pay debts, asshole." The drug dealer gestures to one of his men, who lifts an iron pipe.
Before he can strike, I’m already in motion.
My knife slices through the first man's flesh as easily as cutting butter, and warm blood splatters across my hand. He tries to grunt something, but his throat is already open.
The second man turns, stunned, but I’m already on him. The blade pierces his chest, and I feel his body shudder before he collapses to the ground.
The third one fumbles for a weapon. Terrible idea. A single slash to the side of his neck, and he drops to his knees, hands trembling as he tries to stop the blood gushing hot between his fingers.
Silence falls over the alley. Heavy.
The only sounds are Carter’s ragged breathing and the last, dying gasps of the men at my feet.
Wiping my blade on one of their shirts, I look up at Carter. He’s staring at me like I’m a ghost.
"You…" He can’t even finish the sentence.
I smile. "I solved your problem."
I walk past him without hurry, leaving behind the bodies and the sharp scent of blood in the air.
"Mia," Carter’s voice is thick with desperation. "You have no idea what you just did. This is going to make everything worse. Fuck, we are so screwed."
I don’t flinch. I simply twirl the knife between my fingers before tucking it back into the holster strapped to my thigh.
"Don’t worry. Call Lara." My voice is casual, unbothered. "She’ll call the cleanup crew. They’ll take care of it."
He lets out a bitter laugh, running a bloodstained hand over his face—though, of course, the blood isn’t his.
"You think Lara can fix this?" His eyes, wide with panic, meet mine. "Mia, these guys weren’t just some low-level dealers."
My smile falters. "What do you mean?"
Carter takes a step forward, voice dropping lower. "I tried to get drugs from the Society of Crow, but no one would sell to me. Guess why?" He laughs humorlessly. "Because Lara made sure no one would. I had no choice. I went to the cartel."
My stomach twists.
Cartel.
My gaze drops to the bodies. The blood, still warm, pooling on the dark asphalt. A part of me already knows before I even ask.
"Carter," my voice comes out barely above a whisper. "Which cartel?"
He doesn’t answer.
But I already know.
My chest tightens, and my breath catches. My father.
I just killed my father’s men.
This isn’t exactly new information to him—I’ve killed his people before—but now, I’ve put myself right back in his sights.
"You’re a fucking idiot, Carter!" I snap, smacking him upside the head.
"You’re the one who followed me and killed them all!"
"Obviously, I was trying to save your ungrateful ass."
"Well, you suck at that."
"Shit," I mutter, stepping back, my mind spinning, trying to find a way out of this—
Then I hear it.
An engine.
I turn just in time to see a sleek black car roll up at the end of the alley. The door swings open, and a sharp stiletto heel clicks against the pavement.
Tight dress. Blond hair in a perfectly styled bun.
Paulina.
Shit. Shit.
My stepmother strides toward us with the grace of a queen, her cold eyes sweeping over the scene like she already knows exactly what happened.
But her expression shifts when she sees me.
"Well, this is a surprise."
I take a step back. "Paulina, I—"
But then it happens.
The numbness.
A crushing weight pulling me down.
My heart races, but my eyelids grow heavy. My body sways. The world around me fades.
And then—
Darkness.
I wake up on a couch in a dark shed . My arms aren’t tied and there aren’t men watching me. Confusion floods my mind.
I could’ve sworn that Paulina—Carter.
I step into the main hall and freeze. Paulina sits there, lazily petting her dog, a bored expression on her face. But my gaze shifts past her. Carter is unconscious, covered in blood. My eyes widen in horror.
"You still have that little trouble sleeping out of nowhere?" Paulina muses, her tone laced with mockery.
"If you don’t let me go, I—"
"You what?" She tilts her head with a taunting smile. "Kill more people? Are you going to kill me? There’s no need, dear. You’re not even part of my job. You can go."
I halt mid-step, staring at her in disbelief. What?
"How can I just leave?"
"You walk through the door and get out of here," she says flatly, as if the whole thing bores her.
"You’re not going to drag me back to my father?" I ask, bewildered.
"No."
"But…" Is this a joke?
"Can I take Carter?"
"No, I have to deal with him."
Shit.
"You’re just going to let me walk away?"
"I don’t want anything from you, Mia," Paulina says simply.
I narrow my eyes. "You’re loyal to my father."
"I don’t want you back." Her lip curls in disgust. "There’s nothing I need from you. Not anymore."
Her words settle like lead in my stomach.
Paulina wants a child. Desperately. And I was supposed to give her one. Or rather, she planned to use me to create another human being—another pawn for my father. Her plan was to make me a surrogate mother. My father agreed, as long as I was married first.
Well, I beheaded my first groom.
That ruined their plans. And in retaliation, Paulina tried to have me killed, using one of my father’s lovers as her weapon. That… didn't end well. I killed one of Nico’s strongest soldiers, which sent him into a rage. His punishment? Stripping me of my ability to have children, just to spite Paulina. After that, he discarded me, selling me off to my uncle to be used as his whore.
That’s my family. That’s my father.
Eventually, he realized I wasn’t even useful for that and threw me away like trash. Maybe Paulina is just here to finish the job. Maybe she’s waiting for me to break, to do her work for her.
"Don’t worry," Paulina says lightly. "I got over wanting to kill you. There are much more modern ways to get what I want…"
"Keep talking like I care, Paulina," I snap.
"You were always such an insolent little brat, just like your father. Nico never had much patience," she sneers. "You can see it in the way he’s become a shameless opportunist, hopping from woman to woman. He humiliated me, flaunting his bastard children like proof of his conquest. You? You’re just a freak."
"And you’re just a bitter old woman who tortures children because you can’t have any of your own," I spit.
"Shut your mouth."
The slap is sharp, splitting my lip. I taste blood—but I smile.
"I know that look." She smirks. "It’s cute that you think you can kill me, darling. But like I said, I don’t miss you. If it were up to me, we’d just forget this little incident, and I’d go back to my life."
"You’re not exactly the type to give advice," I growl.
"Zane’s father and I dated when we were younger."
My breath catches. "How do you know about Zane?"
"His mother offered me his organs in exchange for drugs. Despicable, really, what she’d do for heroin. But it was useful. I learned everything I needed to know."
My stomach churns.
"She had three kids with him. Taylor Hill is my favorite. But Zane?" She sniffs. "He’s a cutie. Always thought he was a little too delicate."
She tilts her head, amused. "I’m just a bored wife, Mia. I don’t want to hurt the Hills. Watching them destroy themselves from the inside is entertaining enough. But your father? He will. Once he finds out about your little affair with Zane."
Her gaze flickers to my hand, and her smirk widens.
"Oh my God. Is that a wedding ring?" She lets out a delighted laugh. "Don’t tell me you married him? Mia, you really do know how to live."
My pulse pounds in my ears.
"What do you mean my father will hurt him?" I ask sharply.
Paulina sighs, as if I’m an idiot. "You know how the mafia works. You can’t just go around dating anyone—blah, blah, blah. Stupid rules men impose. It’s obvious, Mia. The moment your father finds out, he’ll kill Zane."
My blood runs cold.
"Unless…"
"Unless what?"
"You go home before he finds out."
I glare. "You’re just trying to manipulate me into going back."
"No." She shrugs. "Like I said, it’s much more convenient for you to stay out of my life. I have better things to do than babysit. But you and I both know how this story ends. You’re not that stupid, Mia."
This is what Paulina loves to do—torture Nico’s illegitimate children. Laura. One. Me.
She hates our existence with every fiber of her being.
But she has a point.
My father will kill Zane. And I just painted a target on his back.
The Society of Crow can protect him—for now. But that protection won’t hold if Zane keeps putting himself in danger by being with me.
"I see you’re finally realizing that I’m right," Paulina hums, satisfaction dripping from her voice. "See? I don’t even need revenge. You do stupid things all on your own. Luckily, I know you’ll make a mess, and I can suggest handling your divorce discreetly. I have contacts."
My jaw tightens. "Why are you helping me?“
"I’m not helping you, I’m helping myself. What part of ‘I’m living perfectly fine without being your nanny’ do you not understand, brat?"
I snort.
I won’t make a deal with the devil, and I know she’s trying to manipulate me into submission, but before I can even respond, Carter’s voice cuts through the tension, rasping in disbelief.
“Are you… Nico Riviera’s daughter?” His eyes widen, the realization sinking in. He finally grasps the weight of the situation, but I know—I'm the last person he should be dealing with when it comes to his drug problems.
“I almost forgot about you,” Paulina sneers, her voice dripping with disdain.
But before Carter can open his mouth again, a gunshot rings out, the sharp crack of the bullet slicing through the air. The sound is deafening as it shatters through his skull, the impact spraying blood and bone in all directions. His head snaps back violently, blood pooling beneath him in a grotesque puddle.
A scream tears itself from my throat, raw and shattered, as I watch the life drain from his eyes, his cold, dead gaze locking with mine.
“Did you like him?” Paulina scoffs, looking down at his lifeless body. “If I had known, I would’ve tortured him more.” The words drip with venom as she steps closer, the madness in her eyes fueling the twisted satisfaction of what she's just done.
No. That bitch. I feel bile rise in my throat, the taste of it burning, but the agony in my chest is so much worse.
Carter’s dead—his skull split open, blood spilling from the ruin of his head in grotesque arcs.
His vacant eyes stare at me, unblinking, like they’re accusing me, like it’s my fault, and I can’t escape the weight of that.
And then, like a whisper in the back of my mind, Lara’s voice. Soft. Pleading. She told me she wanted to make things right with him, with Carter , that she could fix things.
I remember her words like they’re a lifeline, but they slip through my fingers now, like smoke, vanishing in the face of his blood-soaked corpse.
My heart is pounding, but my mind is spinning—no, it’s cracking. The world blurs, twists, everything warping like a nightmare, and I don’t know where I am anymore.
My thoughts start to race, like I'm trapped in a whirlwind of guilt and panic. I should have done something, I should have stopped it, but I couldn’t.
The walls close in around me, the voices—Lara’s voice, Carter’s, Paulina's mocking laughter—are all jumbled, overlapping, screaming in my head.
My chest tightens, my breathing coming in quick, shallow gasps as I struggle to hold onto what’s real, but the line between reality and madness is getting thinner, fading away.
The world around me blurs as grief consumes me, a crushing weight that leaves me numb. Paulina senses my distraction, her gaze sharpening. I try to fight back, to gather some strength, but there are too many of them—too many eyes watching, too many hands reaching to keep me in place.
No, I can’t… I can’t escape.
I woke up in my cell with a strange, familiar feeling . My head felt heavy, as if it had been pulled from the depths of an ocean that didn’t want to let go. There was a ringing in my ears. A weight in my chest. My body was stiff, numb, foreign. I had to take a deep breath just to remind myself I still existed. But even that breath felt detached, like it belonged to someone else.
The faint smell of old sweat clung to the stale air—familiar in a way that made my stomach churn. I looked down and saw I was wearing a stained oversized shirt. One I hadn’t seen in years. One that belonged to another life, another version of me, one that never really escaped. Just like the old times.
Everything inside me recoiled.
No. No, no, no.
It felt like nothing had changed. Like time had curled in on itself, like I was stuck in the same nightmare, endlessly suspended between reality and nothingness. My fingers gripped the edge of the thin mattress, desperate for something solid, but the air felt thick. Untrustworthy. Like a presence I couldn’t see was pressing down on my chest, watching me. Measuring how far gone I was.
Something was wrong.
I felt it in my bones.
My throat was dry. Raw. I tried to swallow, but even that felt like too much. How long had it been?
The door creaked open, and my breath caught.
But it wasn’t her. Not Paulina.
It was Dr. Rachel Wayne.
“You’ve been asleep for quite some time, Miss Riviera,” she said, her tone clinical, detached. Like I was a case file. Like I was a malfunctioning part of a machine she was just waiting to discard.
I pushed myself upright too quickly. My vision blurred, darkening at the edges. My stomach twisted, bile rising up.
“Where’s Paulina?” My voice was tight, scraped raw like gravel dragged across my windpipe.
“She’s still in the States,” the doctor replied without emotion. “She’ll come here to talk to you.”
The words didn’t make sense. I looked around, panic crawling up my throat like ivy.
Sleeping??Asleep??What did that even mean?
“Sleeping?” I rasped. “What do you mean… sleeping?”
She tilted her head at me like she was watching a rat figure out its maze. “You were out. For days. Your body shut down. We were monitoring you.”
I stared at her. No. No, that wasn’t possible.
“I didn’t leave here,” I whispered, gripping my arms.
“Of course not.” Her voice was tinged with something like pity. “You’re not allowed out of the cage.”
Cage.
The word detonated inside me.
Because it was a cage. It had always been a cage. Dressed up like a clinic. Like they were helping me. Like I was the problem.
The doctor sighed. “A man wants to talk to you. Can you promise me you won’t kill him?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. The door opened again, and a man walked in—stiff posture, expensive suit, glasses perched on his nose like he was about to read a death sentence.
“Miss Riviera?”
I didn’t respond.
“I need you to sign here.” He held out a paper. No explanation.
I narrowed my eyes. “Will they kill you if I don’t sign?”
A flicker of hesitation. A glance to the side. A slow, almost imperceptible nod.
I took the pen and signed. I knew what it was. A document pretending I agreed to whatever they were doing to me. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
The man and Rachel disappeared. The silence that followed was suffocating.
Had I dreamt it all?
No. No, it was real. I knew it was real.
But then why did my mind feel like it was splitting apart, like reality was slipping through my fingers? There was a hole in my memories, dark and gaping. I couldn’t reach the other side.
The door creaked again.
Paulina.
She entered the room like a gust of cold wind—her expression calm, detached, as if the past months hadn’t existed for either of us. As if she hadn’t carved herself into my nightmares.
“Your luck is about to change, Mia,” she said smoothly, folding her hands in front of her. “Your father has agreed to relocate you. You’ll stay at your grandfather’s estate. You’ll return to your routine and begin preparing to reintegrate. It’s time you were useful again.”
I laughed—sharp, breathless, on the edge of hysterical.
“What did you do to him?”
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“To Zane,” I snapped, stepping forward. “What did you do to him?”
A pause. A flicker of something behind her eyes. Confusion? Calculation?
Paulina’s tone dropped, calm as a lake before a storm. “Can you tell me who you're referring to, Mia?”
“You know very well,” I growled. “Don’t play that game with me. He’s real. He’s real.”
She tilted her head, voice laced with pity. “You were alone, Mia.”
“No,” I said quickly. “No. He was there. He stayed with me. We—” My voice cracked. “We traveled. France. Spain. He taught me how to exist without fear. He held me when I cried. I wore his stupid clothes. He hated when I stole his hoodies—”
“Mia—”
“Don’t!” I pointed at her, rage climbing up my throat like bile. “Don’t you dare look at me like I made him up. I know he’s real.”
She stepped closer, slowly, her heels soft against the floor.
“Do you hear yourself?” she asked gently. “You’ve been in this facility for over four years. You never left, Mia. Never traveled. Never had a boyfriend. You were sedated after your last… episode.”
I shook my head violently. “That’s a lie. I remember him. His voice. His scent. I remember the way he looked at me like I wasn’t broken.”
“You dreamed him into existence,” she said. “That’s what your mind does, Mia. It creates narratives to survive. You’ve always done this—since you were a child. Do you remember Adele, your friend?”
I faltered. “She was—”
“She never existed. We made her up together, remember? As part of your therapeutic roleplay.”
My knees felt weak.
“That’s not true. That’s not—he’s different,” I whispered.
She crouched slightly to meet my gaze, her voice low and soft, like a mother soothing a sick child. “Zane. Was he tall? Beautiful? Gentle with you? Did he tell you you were more than your illness?”
My throat tightened. Tears stung my eyes.
“Yes,” I choked. “He did. Because it’s true. He—he loved me.”
Paulina nodded slowly. “Of course he did. Because he was everything you needed. The only thing your mind couldn’t find in this place. You created him to feel alive.”
I stared at her, my body trembling. “No. I didn’t. I couldn’t have made someone like him up. He was… the realest thing I ever had.”
She stood again, towering over me. “Exactly,” she said softly. “Because you built him that way. You made him real to you. You made him perfect.”
I was breathing too fast. I wanted to scream. But her voice kept wrapping around my neck like a silk ribbon. Choking me with reason.
“You told him you loved him,” she continued, “but what was he, Mia? A boy with no record, no presence, no one else who saw him but you. You think we didn’t investigate?”
My knees hit the floor. My fingers clawed at the fabric of my pants. “You’re lying. You have to be lying.”
“We showed you his picture once,” Paulina said, crouching beside me. “You stared at a blank page. There was no one there. You said you saw him. But the page was empty.”
No.
No.
I remembered his eyes. His trembling hands. The first time he said my name like it meant something. How could that be fake? How could something so intimate be artificial?
“I want to see him,” I whispered. “Let me call him. Let me—”
“There is no number, Mia. There is no him. There never was.”
I gasped.
It felt like my soul was falling out of my body.
“But I felt him,” I said, barely audible. “I still do. I still hear him sometimes.”
“I know,” Paulina said softly. “That’s your grief. That’s your mind protecting you from the truth.”
Tears blurred my vision.
Maybe I had created him. Maybe I was just… lonely enough. Sick enough.
“Let it go,” she said, brushing a strand of hair from my face with surgical precision, like she was straightening a doll. Her voice dropped into something sharper, colder. “He was never real, Mia. And this—” she gestured to the sterile room around us, the dim light, the locked door, “—this is your home. You’re safe here. You belong here. And the sooner you stop fighting that, the easier it’ll be to fix you.”
A part of me wanted to scream at her.
But a deeper part—some small, broken thing—curled inward and believed her.
Because if he wasn’t real…
Then I wasn’t broken for losing him.
I was broken for never having him at all.
That can’t be true.?That can’t be true.
He was real. Zane was real.
I told him he was the realest thing I ever had. I meant it. God, I meant it with every piece of me. I felt it.
But…
Had I only wished him into existence?
Had I crafted him out of my need for something good, someone safe?
I remembered his eyes. How they softened when he looked at me. How his fingers shook the first time he held my hand. How his mouth pressed against mine like he was scared I'd disappear.
But if that wasn’t real…
Then what was?
Maybe that’s why he was so perfect. Because I created him. Maybe I gave myself the kind of love I thought I deserved and just—believed it.
The realization numbed me so completely that I lost my grip on reality again. I slipped into that place—the void—where even the voices couldn’t reach me. Silence swallowed everything.
I didn’t notice when I left the cage. Didn’t register Paulina’s hands guiding me, dressing me in her twisted idea of what acceptable looked like. I didn’t fight. I didn’t speak. I just… let her. Because something inside me had shut down. Like a switch flipped. Like whatever part of me that used to scream had finally gone still.
The mansion was old. Dusty. Echoing with memories I didn’t recognize. I smiled when we arrived. As convincingly as I could. But inside, something in me was dying.
Because worse than the pain of loss is realizing there was never anything to lose.
The voices around me seemed distant.
For a second, I swore I heard Zane shout my name. I turned around.
And I saw him.
His ghost.
His desperate eyes.
He looked at me as if he felt me giving up on him. As if somehow, I was giving up on myself. I blinked.
Closed my eyes. Breathed. But when I opened them, he was gone.
I stopped speaking. Stopped trying to piece it together.
The truth had begun to rot inside me. I never left the basement. I never traveled. I never had a brother who survived or a sister who smiled when I walked in the room. I never kissed someone on a Paris street. I never wore his clothes or curled into his chest on rainy nights.
I never loved.
I invented it all.
I invented him.
I told myself he was the realest thing in my life. And maybe… he was. Maybe that’s the saddest part of it all.
I spent hours staring into space, whispering arguments to the voices in my head, fighting back the images that threatened to break me.
But no matter what I did…
I couldn’t get him out of me.
Zane. His ghost. His warmth. His voice.
I will never love anyone like I loved him.
And he was never real.