Orion carried Lemira into the VIP suite, moving as if she were made of fragile glass.

As he laid her down and pulled the blankets over her, he realized her fingers were still locked in a death grip around his shirt. Her knuckles were bone-white, clinging to him as if he were the only thing keeping her tethered to reality.

Orion's chest tightened.

Instead of pulling away, he sat down on the edge of the mattress, gently brushing the hair from her forehead. What exactly was she so terrified of?

The door clicked open, and Thaddeus slipped inside. "Is Lemon okay? The director told me the procedure was flawless."

Thaddeus had seen the chaotic aftermath in the hallway and assumed something had gone catastrophically wrong.

Orion kept his voice low, his eyes never leaving Lemira's sleeping face. "The procedure was fine. The problem was when she woke up."

He quickly relayed exactly what had transpired in the operating room.

Thaddeus's expression darkened. "Knowing Lemon, there's definitely more to this. She doesn't panic over nothing."

"I know."

"Those Langstons are absolute garbage. Look what they've done to our girl."

Orion shot him a deadpan look. "Your girl?"

Thaddeus cleared his throat, holding his hands up in surrender. "Right, sorry. *Your* girl. My bad."

Orion turned his gaze back to Lemira, his tone chillingly casual. "If my suspicions are correct, I am going to bury that entire family."

"And they deserve it. But why hasn't she ever mentioned this to us?" Thaddeus mused, genuinely confused. "We know all about the other horrible things she went through with them. Why keep Rowan a secret?"

Orion's jaw clenched. "I ran a background check on Rowan Langston a while ago. He relocated to an offshore research facility years ago and barely ever returned to the mainland."

"How long ago?"

"Shortly after their parents died. He fast-tracked his medical degree and just left." Thaddeus rubbed his chin. "So they barely lived together. What could have possibly happened in that short window to terrify her to the point of silence?"

"I suspect he used her as a test subject for his clinical trials," Orion stated flatly.

Thaddeus swore violently under his breath. "If that's true, I swear to God, we're going to make that bastard suffer."

Orion tightened his grip on Lemira's cold hand. "Whatever it takes."

He would never let her live in fear again.

For the rest of the night, time seemed to drag on indefinitely for everyone sitting vigil in the hospital.

Only Lemira remained deeply asleep.

But beneath the surface, her mind

was a warzone. She was trapped in a relentless cycle of nightmares, waking up from

e terror only met.

-realize she was drowning in another. She dreamt of the dorm fire, of waking up on Rowan's operating table without her kidney, and finally, of the defining horror of her life: the childhood car crash.

She was back in the backseat of the sedan. Her father was driving, her mother sitting beside her.

Then came the deafening crush of metal. The smell of gasoline.

She remembered her mother's blood-soaked hands shoving her through the shattered window.

"Please... take her first," her mother sobbed.

scrap Watched as a pair of young,

hands reached through

the jagged glass puting

her out of the wreckage.

SV

She was hauled away and pulled firmly against a small but steady chest.

"Don't be afraid. I'm right here," a teenage boy's voice, cracking slightly, echoed above her.

Why did that voice sound so familiar?

The boy set her down on the pavement and turned back, sprinting toward the mangled car to pull her parents out.

But he was too late. The car erupted into a massive fireball.

Lemira stood there, staring at the

one

flames She was paralyzed, entirely

Incapable of

able of producing a sin

single

d or shedding a single.

It was the profound, suffocating numbness of ultimate despair.