Prologue
Vidhya
Northgate, 2013
The mansion burned, and all I saw was red.
Not the flames. Not the blood. The rage.
It throbbed behind my eyes, loud and vicious, drowning out everything else. A living thing—sharp, feral—tearing through me without permission. My hands shook, not with fear, but with something splintering apart, thread by thread.
They took everything. Something I was supposed to protect.
That was the part that crushed my chest—harder than the smoke, heavier than the fire. I had failed at the only thing that had ever mattered.
Then the screaming started.
“Please—please, I didn’t touch her!”
“You’re a demon—someone stop her!”
“Bitch! You think this ends here?!”
Their voices blurred together, words losing shape, faces melting into noise. Begging. Cursing. Promises. I heard them, but nothing connected. Nothing stayed.
I didn’t think. I didn’t choose. I moved.
Bodies fell. I don’t remember how many. Hands reached for me and slipped away. Someone cried. Someone prayed. Someone laughed until the sound broke off too suddenly.
The fire roared. Beams cracked. Smoke burned my lungs, but I barely noticed. Pain brushed against me and passed, unable to find anything solid to land on. My world narrowed until there was only motion. Only red. Only the weight of failure pressing down on my spine.
A blade. A gasp. A body hitting the floor.
“Monster,” someone screamed. “You’ll burn in hell,” another hissed through blood. I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I understood what words were anymore.
I walked through the mansion without knowing where I was going, stepping over bodies like obstacles I hadn’t meant to place there. This place had caged us. Owned us. Used us.
Now it was collapsing, screaming as loudly as the people inside it. The others—the ones like me—were already gone. That memory floated somewhere far away. Doors opened. Paths cleared. That part had happened before everything broke.
The mansion folded in on itself. Fire swallowed walls, ceilings, anything that tried to remain. I stood where it ended, ash settling on my skin, blood drying on my hands like it belonged to someone else.
All I could see was her face. All I could feel was the hollow space where the baby should have been. Something inside me didn’t harden. It emptied. Whatever I had been before burned with the mansion, leaving nothing whole behind.
I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I had done.
I only knew this:
I couldn’t protect anything.
Everything was already lost.
