MARGARET’S POV
The dial tone droned on.
Steady. Impersonal. Unforgiving.
I stared at the dark screen of my phone, my fingers still curled around it as though if I held on long enough, the call might resu on its own.
As though Seraphina might sigh, call my na the way she used to when she was small, and give one more chance to find the right words.
The sound finally cut off.
The silence that followed was heavier, more suffocating than the dial tone itself.
I lowered the phone slowly, my hand trembling despite years of discipline and posturing that should have taught my body better.
For a long mont, I simply stood there in my room, staring at nothing, my reflection faintly visible in the glass wall overlooking the moonlit garden.
I had done it again—pushed Sera away.
The realization struck with dull, familiar pain, like pressing on a bruise you believed no longer existed, only to find it still tender beneath the surface.
I closed my eyes.
The sealing had been necessary.
That truth anchored , as it always had. No matter how often guilt gnawed at the edges of my resolve, no matter how vividly Seraphina’s young face haunted my dreams, that single fact had never wavered.
Necessary.
And yet.
mory surged without invitation, dragging backward more than two decades, to a ti when necessity had not yet entered my vocabulary.
Sera had been six.
Too young to understand why her mother hovered, why her father’s gaze tracked her every movent with quiet vigilance.
I knew, now, as an adult, she believed her father and I had always harbored contempt for her. But that was never true.
Even the difficulty of her birth—the agony, the blood, the terror, my own brush with death—could not diminish the joy that flooded us when we first held her.
She had been worth every mont of it.
She had been...everything.
My firstborn. My daughter.
In my bloodline, daughters carried weight. aning. Power.
We traced ourselves through the won, through their resilience and quiet dominion, through the way they shaped the world without ever needing to announce it.
And Sera had fit so perfectly into that expectation.
She was healthy. Bright-eyed. Curious in a way that delighted rather than exhausted. She laughed easily, loved deeply, and had a way of drawing people toward her without trying.
Servants adored her. Elders smiled indulgently at her questions. Even Edward—stern, austere Edward—always lted when she slipped her tiny hand into his.
She was perfect.
Until she wasn’t.
The first incident had been easy to dismiss.
A tantrum, we told ourselves.
We were overreacting. A bad dream spilling into daylight.
The second was harder.
The third sent a cold thread of fear curling down my spine.
Things broke around her.
Not always visibly. Not always dramatically. Sotis it was a headache so sudden and severe that she collapsed, screaming.
Sotis it was a servant fainting when Sera cried too hard.
Sotis it was pressure—an unseen force that thickened the air, made my skin crawl, and set every instinct on edge.
At first, we tried to help.
We chased every redy—ancient tos, modern experts, called in owed favors—relentlessly, desperate for hope.
We frad her peculiarity as delayed wolf ergence, as an anomaly that would correct itself with ti.
It didn’t.
It escalated.
The power, whatever it was, manifested in bursts that left Sera pale and trembling, her small fra buckling under the force of what surged through her. Each episode arrived sooner, struck harder.
Once, she stopped breathing.
I still rembered collapsing to the floor, cradling her limp body, screaming for healers, for anyone, for sothing to fix what was so terribly wrong with my baby girl.
Edward’s face haunted —ashen, stricken with a terror I had never seen in him.
The realization ca slowly, and after we almost lost her more than once, we could no longer deny it.
This wasn’t a gift that could be trained.
It wasn’t sothing that could be guided gently into control.
It was too much. Too dangerous. Too hungry.
Fate had not blessed us with a powerful daughter.
It had marked us with a curse.
We resisted that conclusion with everything we had because accepting it ant acknowledging the next step.
And that step was unthinkable.
‘If the girl walks the path she was born for, she will be hunted. Danger will greet her at every curve of the road. If she remains ordinary, she will live.’
She had to live. She had to.
So we did it: the sealing.
Even now, the re thought of the word churned my stomach.
But when Catherine arrived—grave, composed, eyes sharp with an understanding that went far deeper than ours—she confird what we had been desperately avoiding.
If we did nothing, Sera would die.
Not imdiately. Not cleanly.
But eventually.
Her body would fail under the strain. Or she would draw attention she could not survive. Or the power itself would consu her.
The sealing was the only path that led to a future where she lived.
Even if that future was...smaller. Ordinary.
I moved towards the drawer beneath my desk and unlocked it, retrieving the old fra I never let myself look at for too long.
The day before the ritual, we gave Sera everything.
Edward and I planned it carefully—a perfect day, crafted down to the smallest detail. No lessons. No expectations. Just laughter and sunlight and the illusion of normalcy.
We took her to the cliffs, let her run wild until her cheeks glowed and her hair whipped into knots. We gorged on sweets and took silly photos.
One of them sat now in my hands.
I stroked a trembling finger along the edges of the fra, worn smooth with ti.
In the photo, we stood entwined—Sera perched in Edward’s arms, my own wrapped around them, all of us beaming at the lens.
It was the happiest day of our lives.
And the last before everything changed.
The ritual itself was rcifully hazy in my mory. So wounds the mind refuses to reopen fully.
But I rembered the aftermath.
Sera woke confused. Quieter. Diminished.
And to protect the secret—to ensure nothing stirred the sealed power—we had done sothing else.
A choice I still struggled to justify, even now.
We put Ethan and Celeste’s mories to sleep.
Not erased. Just...tucked away. Their mories of Sera’s episodes softened, blurred into hazy recollections of sickness and frailty.
Enough to keep them from asking the wrong questions. Enough to keep Sera safe.
From that day on, she was unremarkable. Ordinary.
We kept her close. Sheltered. Watched.
And she lived.
She struggled, yes. There were monts of friction, of resentnt, of pain. And I told myself they were preferable to a grave.
At least she was alive.
That conviction had carried for more than twenty years.
But since that day in the library, doubt had begun to seep in.
And now, tonight...
She’d found the Origins Archives Room.
She had broken the seal.
The force we’d worked so hard to bury was no longer slumbering.
Worse still, she sounded...well.
Stronger. Brighter. More herself than she had ever been.
The plan had veered off course.
Dangerously.
And Edward—
I pressed my fingers to my lips, stifling a sob as his face surfaced in my mind.
Months before his passing, he had broached the subject so carefully I’d pretended not to understand. Suggested, obliquely, that perhaps the ti had co to reconsider old decisions.
I had shut him down. Told him it was too late, too dangerous. That reopening those wounds would only bring pain.
Now, I wondered if he had sensed what I could not. If he had felt the world shifting beneath the safety net we had so carefully woven.
I set the photo aside and began to pace, my steps restless and uneven.
I had promised Seraphina the truth.
I would not fail her again.
If answers existed, they lay with Catherine.
She had perford the sealing. She had understood its cost and risks. She knew exactly what had been taken.
Luckily, she was in the Maldives with Celeste. Perfect coincidence.
I would go ahead of schedule.
Not just as a mother visiting her daughter, but as a woman ready at last to face the consequences of her own choices.
The past had been buried for decades.
But now it was stirring.
And I would et it head-on.
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