The sun never truly rose that morning.
It bled instead pale and red through a haze of smoke, as if the world itself had been wounded.
Isabella leaned against the cracked wall of the corridor, her breath unsteady, her hand resting over her stomach. Every pulse she felt beneath her palm carried a strange rhythm now something foreign threading through the heartbeat of her child. She could feel Genesis moving inside her, not like life but like electricity trying to remember it was once human.
"Stay with me," she whispered to the life within her, her voice trembling but fierce. "Don't let her win. You're mine. Not Evelyn's. Mine."
Her reflection in the broken glass opposite her was a stranger wild-eyed, pale, streaked with soot and tears. Gone was the woman who once feared boardrooms and society gossip. This Isabella had walked through hellfire, fallen in love with a man who burned everything he touched, and still somehow found the strength to rise.
