Chapter 20
Twenty
AURELIA
There’s a loud bang coming from downstairs.
My eyes fly open, and I gasp, looking around the room.
Nathaniel is still fast asleep beside me, and careful not to wake him, I slip silently toward the door.
Another noise follows, and I freeze for a second, trying to place it.
It sounds like someone is trapped in one of the rooms below, fighting to get out.
Something inside me tells me not to follow it, but something stronger pulls me forward anyway.
I make my way downstairs, taking the turn to the right and following the hallway to the very end.
The sound is coming from behind the wooden panel beneath the staircase.
I press my hand against it, feeling along the cold wood, hoping to find some kind of handle.
When I push near the top, the hidden door creaks open.
Behind it, there’s another door. I push that open too and stare at the narrow staircase disappearing into the dark below.
I realize this must be the basement Nathaniel told me about.
I swallow against the sharp knot in my throat as a cold breeze brushes my skin, raising goosebumps along my arms. I step down slowly, one stair at a time, until my feet finally touch the basement floor.
A faint light spills in from the left. I move toward it, deeper into the dark, and then I see a man is chained to the wall.
I gasp, my hand flying over my mouth.
He lifts his head, and the second my eyes meet his bruised, bloodied face, I recognize him.
It’s Daniel.
He’s alive.
Nathaniel is keeping him here.
“Aurelia,” he whimpers in pain.
I take a step back, my hip knocking into a table.
A bucket tips over and crashes to the floor, teeth scattering across the floor with a chilling, clattering sound.
My breathing turns ragged as my gaze drifts across the basement, unfocused at first, until it catches on a closet at the end of the left wall.
A tear slips down my cheek, and as I look at Daniel, everything comes back. Every single thing he did to me. And Nathaniel made sure he got the same in return.
I move closer and see him begging, see how broken he looks now, how weak, how pitiful.
My jaw clenches, my brows lifting as I step in front of him. I free one of his hands, only then noticing the other is severed. Carefully, I help him up.
“Let me take you out of here.”
“Thank you,” he cries. “Thank you.”
I hook his arm over my shoulder and drag him up the stairs. His weight fights me with every step. When we reach the basement door, I shove it open, then slam it shut behind us.
We stagger toward the front door. My pulse pounds so hard it blurs everything, and I’m still not sure what I’m doing. But the second I see Nathaniel’s car in front I rush towards it. I open the back door, and Daniel weakly folds into the seat.
I slide into the driver’s seat and grab the key from the passenger compartment, right where I saw Nathaniel leave it earlier.
My hands shake as I start the engine and pull away.
“How did he find you?” I ask, glancing at him.
“I survived,” he hisses. “I went home, and something hit me from behind. Next thing I knew, I was in that basement, being tortured by one of his men.”
“Name?” I ask, pressing harder on the gas.
“Victor.”
I nod and look at him in the rearview mirror.
“How do you know Nathaniel?” I ask, trying to piece everything together.
“We met in school. We were both assholes. Bonded over making fun of other kids,” he hisses, then cries out in pain. “Why do you even want to know? It’s over.” He shakes his head, then lets out a weak laugh. “He can have you now.”
“Did you even love me?” I ask, my eyes burning with tears.
“At the beginning, maybe,” he whimpers. “But later you turned so cold and distant, and all you ever talked about was him.
“What?” I say, looking at him, then back at the road. “You self-centered buffoon, all I ever saw was you, and if you didn’t beat the shit out of me so often, maybe I would have been talking about you.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” he says.
I close my eyes and inhale, then open them again, gripping the wheel so hard my fingers hurt as I slam on the brakes and turn onto the road by the cliffs. The same road where he left me six years ago, bleeding out.
When the car stops, I storm out.
I rip open the back door and shout, “Get out of the car.”
He drags himself out, standing weakly in front of me. “What are you going to do?” he asks.
I move to the trunk and throw it open, my eyes landing on a knife inside.
“Get in.”
He coughs, then slowly steps away from the car.
Something inside me snaps. I move fast, grabbing his hair and yanking him backward until he crashes onto the grass. Then I drag him as hard as I can toward the trunk.
“Get inside,” I say again.
This time, he enters voluntarily.
As he lies down, I say, “There’s a knife in there. Carve thirty cuts into your stomach for the thirty times you hit me and left me like I was trash.”
I close the trunk.
Tears spill down my cheeks as my jaw trembles.
I start the car again and drive toward the cliff, pressing down on the gas as I shove the door open.
Just before the car reaches the edge, I jump out, my body rolling across the grass as I hear the car slam against the rocks below, tip once more, then disappear into the ocean.
I push myself up, brush the grass from my knees, and start walking back to the house like nothing happened at all.
There’s been a strange silence in the house for the past few days. Nathaniel is quieter, and I can’t stop wondering if it’s because he noticed Daniel is missing. And I’m not ready to admit that I’m the one who let him go.
I stare at myself in the mirror, moving slightly to the side as I look at my stomach. I feel so bloated today.
I hear voices from downstairs. I pull my shirt back down and make my way out, moving slowly to the bottom of the stairs.
I sit halfway down, still and quiet, listening as Victor and Nathaniel talk below.
“Did you find him?” Nathaniel asks Victor.
“No trace of him or the car,” Victor says. “The basement door was unlocked when I noticed he was gone.”
“We have to find him,” Nathaniel says, starting to pace across the lobby. “If he gets to his father, they’ll run, and Aurelia will never get her money or the house back.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Victor says. “Dasha said her friend from the police arrested William Grant after Masha brought the papers in.”
“Good,” Nathaniel says, finally stopping.
“Did you tell her yet?” Victor asks.
I slowly rise to my feet and move closer to the room. My lips part as I look at them, walking inside.
“Tell me what?”
Victor doesn’t say a word. He just leaves, leaving Nathaniel and me alone.
He sits down with a long exhale, then drags both hands over his head and down his face before he says. “Sit.”
I move closer to him.
“Fuck,” he says. “I don’t even know where to start.”
I place my hand on his thigh and squeeze his knee.
He turns to me and locks his eyes with mine. “Masha found your death certificate among your father’s papers.” He swallows hard. “She was looking for fraud because I hired her to find anything we could use to get your home back.”
I stare at him, my heart pounding.
Part of me wants to hold on to the fact that he cares enough to try to get back the house where I grew up, but the rest of me can’t get past the words “death certificate.”
“How...?” I start, but before I can finish, he lifts the paper and places it in my hand.
My name is written there in my mother’s handwriting, her signature pressed at the bottom. I just stare at it in silence.
“Say something,” he says, watching me.
“I need some space,” I whisper as I rise and leave the room, heading for the front door and walking out to the pavilion.
All I see are rows of white roses as I sit down on the swing and rock myself slowly, staring at the piece of paper that erased my whole life.
I hear soft footsteps approaching, then stopping right in front of me. Small black shoes with white socks. I lift my face and see Lily standing there.
“Can you make me remember?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Who am I?” I wipe a tear from my cheek. “Do you know who I am?”
She shakes her head again, then moves to the swing beside mine and sits down.
“Of course, silly,” she says. “You are me, and I am you.”
“What do you mean?”
She lifts her index finger and presses it gently to my forehead, and the second I close my eyes, flashes begin to stir at the edges of my mind, colliding and blurring together.
I see Lily, and I see myself, and I see my mother crying.
Lily and I had been playing by the river. We were both only six, and even though we had barely started at the Academy, we had already become best friends. She had lost her parents when she was little, so she was raised by her aunt, who slowly became my mother’s closest friend.
One day after school, we went to visit her aunt, who was staying at one of the Rosewood residences near the river. It had rained the day before, and neither of us knew how that day would end.
The adults brushed us off. They told Nathaniel and Viviane to keep an eye on us, but they were too busy in the tree house, playing truth or dare.
So Lily and I went down to the river and played hide and seek.
At some point, I remembered slipping. Lily must have slipped too, because that was the last time I saw her.
But now the memory came back in flashes.
Lily was on a metal table at the morticians.
My mother had bleached her red hair blonde and paid the mortician to keep quiet.
And me, she dyed my blonde hair red and made me sit at the piano for twelve hours a day, forcing me through memories that had never been mine.
Aurelia died that day, not me. Her body had swollen so badly from the water that no one realized it was her, and with my hair dyed red, Mom took me away for a while and made me practice with Dasha until I no longer looked like someone anyone would recognize.
Dasha never put the pieces together. She had only seen us a handful of times, and all she noticed was a girl acting strange after trauma.
My Dad never found out either. He had been away for work for three years before he came back, and my mother buried herself in work, leaving me with Dasha and the others.
My whole life, I had lived someone else’s life so completely that I believed it was mine, and now I had no idea who I was. I was still Aurelia, but I was Lily too.
I had almost died three times, and apparently three times was enough to seal it, enough to make me see death.
That was why I had been seeing ghosts.
I had been seeing Lily as a little blonde girl because that was how she had been buried. I had been seeing Viviane because she had died that way. And the others were all the ones who had died here.
I had been right all along. I was one of them. Not because I was truly dead, but because a part of me had died with her that day.
I open my eyes and see Lily walking away.
“You can be Lily now,” she says. “I’m tired of being Lily all the time.”
She smiles. “It can be our game.”
Except, life isn’t a game. It’s life, and mine was taken away. Suddenly, by accident, by some force I still can’t name. And I’m here, flesh and bone, while my soul feels like it belongs somewhere else.
I notice Nathaniel approaching. He moves closer, then kneels beside me.
“I’m Lily,” I sniffle. “I remember now. Aurelia died that day.” Tears spill down my cheeks.
He steps back for a moment, straightening, his hands falling into his pockets.
“What do you mean?”
“You noticed it yourself. I was different,” I say. “I was never meant to live her life, and yet I’m here, and she’s not.”
“Don’t say that,” he says, coming closer again.
“And if you had to choose,” I ask, my voice breaking, “if you could save her instead of me, would you?”
“No,” he says instantly. “Even if I could turn back time, I would choose you over and over again. Even if you were someone else.”
“Why?”
“Because you are the one I fell in love with. The one who protected me from my grandfather when he beat me. The one who was there every time I needed someone to call.” He pulls me closer. “And you answered every time.”
He wipes my tears away and cups my cheeks. “You can keep living her life a little longer, or you can finally live yours. It’s up to you.”
He reaches for a white rose beside the pavilion and places it in my hand. “Do you know what I love about roses?”
He smiles softly. “They have thorns to protect themselves, and they still bloom into something beautiful.”
“Do you love white ones because they remind you of apologies?” I ask.
“No.” He kisses my forehead. “They’re meant for new beginnings.”
I press the rose close to my face, seeing life a little differently now.