CHAPTER 3 — THE GIRL THEY COULDN’T BURY
CHAPTER 3 — THE GIRL THEY COULDN’T BURY
Everything after that became motion and noise.
Vincent pulled me off the bed as the mattress tore under bullets meant for him. Glass rained down like frozen rain. Alarms screamed somewhere in the building.
“Stay behind me,” he barked.
“I don’t even know what’s happening!” I shouted back.
He dragged me through a side door I hadn’t seen before—hidden panel, emergency corridor, the kind of architecture built by people who expected betrayal.
“They’re not here for me anymore,” he said.
A burst of gunfire echoed behind us.
“They’re here for you.”
We ran.
I barely felt my feet.
I barely felt anything except the ring burning cold against my skin like it was waking up.
We reached a stairwell.
Vincent stopped suddenly, gripping my shoulders.
“Listen to me,” he said sharply.
His calm was gone now. Something raw underneath it had surfaced.
“That ring belonged to my sister.”
My breath stalled.
“She died,” I whispered.
“No,” he said again, more forcefully this time. “She was taken the same night your mother disappeared.”
The world stopped making sense in layers.
Vincent reached into his coat and pulled out a second object.
A small, silver crest.
My mother’s handwriting engraved on the back.
My name.
Not the one I grew up with.
The real one.
The one I had never heard before that moment.
The stairs beneath me felt like they dropped away.
“They erased you,” Vincent said. “And whoever ordered that crash just made a mistake.”
Another explosion rocked the building above us.
Dust fell like ash.
Vincent grabbed my hand.
“For twenty years,” he said, “they believed you were gone.”
His grip tightened.
“But you’re not.”
He looked me straight in the eye.
“And now they’re going to learn what happens when something they buried… comes back breathing.”
Outside, sirens howled closer.
Inside, everything I thought I was began to collapse.
And for the first time in my life…
I wasn’t running away.
May you like
I was running toward the truth.
THE END
