Chapter 15: The Breaking Point
"This is where we stop pretending.This is where the mask shatters."
There's a moment just before something breaks.
A pause.
A breath.
Like the silence before glass shatters.
I've been living in that breath for too long.
Now it's time to exhale.
I didn't sleep.
Couldn't.
Every creak in the floorboards felt like Lucian's footstep. Every shadow on the wall looked like a memory reaching for my throat.
I tore my apartment apart that night.
Looking for bugs. For trackers. For anything that said he'd been here again.
But there was nothing.
Just me.
And the ghosts I'd made room for.
The precinct felt foreign now.
Too bright. Too clean.
They looked at me like I was unraveling.
They weren't wrong.
Captain Meyers pulled me aside. Her voice low. Controlled.
"You're not yourself lately."
I almost laughed.
Because that was the problem—I was exactly myself. No masks. No shields.
Just Aesira.
The woman who used to kill and called it art.
The woman who now wore a badge and called it justice.
And suddenly, I didn't know which version was the lie.
That night, I stood in front of the mirror.
Not the one in my bedroom.
The one he left me.
A tall antique thing, framed in tarnished gold, brought to the villa during one of his many quiet obsessions.
I kept it.
Why?
Because I needed to see.
I needed to know.
And what I saw staring back at me wasn't a detective.
It wasn't a monster, either.
It was something in between.
Someone who still remembered how it felt to slide the blade.
To feel the quiet after the scream.
To look down at a corpse and see beauty.
He called me that night.
No words. Just the sound of a music box playing from the other end.
I knew the song.
It was the one my mother used to play when I couldn't sleep.
Only three people in the world knew that.
Two of them were dead.
The third… was Lucian.
I snapped.
I screamed into the phone. Cursed him. Threatened him.
Told him I'd end him.
And he just whispered—
"Then come home, Aesira."
I threw the phone.
It didn't matter.
He was right.
The villa was home now.
Not because it was safe.
But because it was honest.
It didn't pretend. Didn't lie.
It was the one place where I didn't have to hide what I was.
Where I could bleed and be beautiful.
I packed a bag.
Gun. Gloves. One last orchid pressed between pages of an old case file.
No plan. No backup. No salvation.
Just me, walking back into the fire.