Chapter 5

Terror, cold and suffocating, swallowed me whole.

I scrambled to open the door, but my parents pinned me down from both sides.

In the passenger seat, Chloe crossed her arms, looking back at me with a cold, indifferent stare.

The masks were completely off.

"Why?" I screamed, tears streaming down my face. "Mom, Dad, Chloe! I'm your family! How could you do this to me?"

Chloe sighed. "No one is trying to hurt you, Luna."

"You’re all hurting me! You’ve been lying to me this whole time!" I lost control, screaming at the top of my lungs. "We lived in that crappy apartment our whole lives! You bought that penthouse with Ethan’s money! The neighbor told me everything! You got rich right when I got hurt!"

"You never called the police! Ethan bought you off!"

"What do you want from me? To hand me over to him so he can torture me for the rest of my life?"

Inside my sleeve, my hand gripped a sharp metal pen I had begged from the girl at the mall.

I pulled it out and pressed the tip hard against my own neck. "Keep dreaming! I’d rather die than let you give me to him!"

I expected them to panic, to grab me, or to threaten me with violence.

But they didn't.

Their fake, doting smiles were gone, replaced not by malice, but by an overwhelming sense of exhaustion.

"Luna, we lied to you, yes," Chloe said, rubbing her temples. "But no one is trying to hurt you."

"Everything we did was to protect you."

She looked at our parents. "Should we just tell her? Our little lie seems to be making her condition worse."

I stared at them, my hand still trembling as I held the pen to my neck. I let out a harsh, bitter laugh.

"Protect me?"

"I might have lost my memory, but I'm not stupid! You covered up his crime because he paid you—"

"We covered it up to keep you out of prison!" My dad suddenly roared, his face flushed.

"You think your mental breakdown was because of the assault? No! It was because after we subdued the guy who attacked you, you lost your mind and killed him!"

"If we had called the police, you’d be behind bars for manslaughter!"

"After you killed him, your mind snapped. Ethan was indeed the guy we wanted you to marry, and he loved you enough to pay for the best psychiatrists. He spent a fortune to wipe your memory of the killing, which accidentally blurred your memory of the assault too..."

Ethan reached into his pocket and threw a photograph into the backseat.

In the photo, a blood-splattered, hysterical version of me was slumped over a lifeless body.

They were telling me that the corpse was my attacker. The man I had killed.

My mind went blank.

I had absolutely no memory of this.

I tried to force myself to remember, but a sharp, blinding headache ripped through my skull.

My mom burst into tears, pulling me into a tight embrace. "Don't think about it, Luna. Please. You finally got a chance at a normal life. Don't do this to yourself..."

No. This wasn't right.

I bit my tongue hard, using the pain to keep my head clear. "Even if that’s true, why hide the old apartment? Why act like it never existed?"

"Because that apartment was where the assault happened," Chloe said quietly. "We didn't want you to wander back there and trigger a relapse."

"And yes, I wasn't the best sister growing up. But after what happened, I was devastated. Plus, Ethan bought us the house and gave us enough money to live comfortably so we could focus entirely on taking care of you. I did it for you."

"Luna, if we wanted to hurt you, why go through all this trouble? With Ethan’s money, he could have locked you up in another country years ago."

Too much information was flooding my brain. My thoughts were in complete chaos.

As the car drove back toward the city, everyone fell silent, giving me time to process.

The apartment...

The crime...

They had a perfectly logical explanation for everything.

But what about the sheer terror I felt every time I smelled Ethan's car? Why did my body react with such violent fight-or-flight instincts whenever he got close?

I looked up and caught Ethan's eyes in the rearview mirror.

He sighed. "Luna, I know you're terrified of me."

"Every time you get in my car, your whole body tenses up, doesn't it?"

He pulled out another photo and handed it back.