Chapter 1: The Betrayal Part 1
Narrator: Mila
The sky vomits a black rain that slams against the car’s body, an incessant hammering that echoes in my skull like a funeral countdown.
Inside this car, the air is saturated, almost solid. It is heavy with the scent of that amber and spicy cologne—a luxury fragrance that triggers a violent nausea within me. It’s my brother’s scent, the one he wears like a brand of ownership, an invisible but suffocating imprint on everything he touches.
I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself yet. I am Mila Vance.
If you are reading this, it means you are entering the corridor of my slow death. I am no heroine; I am the scrap of a lineage of monsters in three-piece suits. Since childhood, I’ve been told how lucky I am to be a Vance, that this name opens every door. What they forget to mention is that this name is also a chain tightened a little more every day around my neck, until I can no longer breathe.
To my left, Hugo is sitting. He doesn’t touch me, but his presence consumes the entire space. One leg is crossed with insulting nonchalance, his finger tapping nervously on his knee. He wears that arrogant smile, that rictus that never leaves his lips when he knows he’s won. He hasn’t looked away from me since we left the house—a predator’s gaze savoring its catch.
To him, I am not his sister; I am not even a human being. I am the object that dared to say “no”, the only crack in his armor of perfection.
Behind him, in the seat next to his, is Chloé. My little sister. “The favorite child.”
Do not be fooled by her carefully styled blond curls or her angelic, porcelain-doll face. Chloé is the pure product of my parents’ venom, a miniature and even crueler version of our mother. She looks at me with sovereign contempt, her eyes glittering with a sickly impatience. She is waiting to see me disappear so she can finally reign alone over this kingdom of lies. She helped Hugo prepare for my departure with undisguised joy. It was she who laughed—a crystalline and terrifying laugh—when they threw my private journal into the fireplace.
They are all my enemies. All accomplices in a silent crime.
The sedan brakes brutally, tires screeching on the soaked asphalt. Ahead of us rises a wall of smoked glass, a brutal structure that seems to pierce the clouds to suck the lightning in.
The Obsidian Clinic.
