Chapter 132: Where Did that Scar come From?

Astrid Vale

"You’re home," my mother said softly, brushing a strand of hair from my forehead. "No one took you anywhere."

I reached up and touched her face, needing to feel it, needing proof that this wasn’t some cruel trick my mind was playing on itself. Her skin was warm under my fingers, familiar in a way that unraveled something tight in my chest I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying for so long.

"I dreamed I was kidnapped," I whispered. "There was an underground city. People chained. A curse."

She smiled, worried but gentle, dabbing the cloth against my forehead again. "You’ve had a fever for two days," she said. "It’s given you all kinds of strange dreams. You’re safe. You’re home."

I let myself look around the room properly then, taking in every detail. The cracked windowpane in the corner, the same one that had let in a draft every winter for as long as I could remember. Her dresser, chipped along one edge from where I’d knocked it as a child. The smell of candle wax and something sweet cooking downstairs. Every sound outside the window matched what I remembered from childhood, distant voices, the creak of the building settling, the particular quality of light filtering through old curtains.

I wanted to believe it. God, I wanted to believe it so badly that for several long minutes, I didn’t question anything at all. I let her feed me broth, let her fuss over the blanket, let her hum something under her breath the way she always used to while she worked.

"Do you remember your fever breaking last time?" she asked, settling back into the chair beside my bed. "You were delirious for hours."

"I remember Moonshade," I said slowly, testing the word.

Her brow furrowed. "Moonshade?"

"The academy," I said. "Where I go to school."

She looked at me with such genuine confusion that something cold slid down my spine despite the warmth of the room. "Sweetheart, you’ve never attended any academy. You’ve been here with me your whole life."

I stared at her. "That’s not true."

"Astrid," she said gently, "you’ve been sick. Fevers can twist memories into things that feel completely real."

But I remembered it. Ivy dragging suitcases up two flights of stairs. Reed’s careful, guarded expression the first time he really looked at me. Xander’s grin, infuriating and warm at the same time. The mate bond settling into place between the three of us. The east wing, the messages, the underground city, Liora’s sacrifice.

"What about Reed and Xander?" I asked, my voice barely steady.

She shook her head slowly. "Who?"

"Reed and Xander Ashwood," I said. "You’ve never heard those names?"

"No," she said, and something in the flatness of her tone made my chest ache. "Sweetheart, you’ve never met them. There’s no one by those names in your life."

I closed my eyes, trying to hold onto the memory of Reed’s hands on my face, Xander’s laugh echoing through our shared apartment. It was all still there, vivid and complete, and yet this room, this bed, my mother’s living face in front of me, felt just as real, maybe more real, layered over everything else like it belonged there instead.

I made myself ask the question I’d spent years avoiding. "What happened the night you died?"

Her expression stilled. "I didn’t die."

I stared at her.

"You were young," she said carefully. "Feverish, frightened, confused. Children remember things wrong sometimes, especially frightening things. What you think you remember from that night isn’t quite what happened."

The memory shifted before I could stop it, reshaping itself in real time behind my eyes. The King entering our home, yes, but this time he spoke instead of striking. My mother argued with him, sharp and unafraid, telling him plainly that I wasn’t his concern. He left. No wet sound in the dark. No blood spreading across the floorboards. No crushed hair clip in his fist.

Tears started falling before I fully understood why. "You’ve spent all these years believing I was gone," she said softly, reaching for my hand. "But I’m right here."

I broke completely. I pulled her into a hug, sobbing into her shoulder the way I hadn’t allowed myself to since that night, years of grief pouring out of me all at once, and for a long, weightless moment I stopped fighting any of it. This was everything I’d wanted since I was seventeen years old, hiding behind a wall while the only person who’d ever truly loved me bled out a few feet away.

I let myself have it. I let myself believe.

She pulled back after a while, reaching over to the small table beside my bed for a cup of water, and as her sleeve slid back, something caught my eye.

A scar, thin and pale, crossing the inside of her wrist.

I stared at it. My mother had never had a scar there. Not once, not in seventeen years of watching her count coins with quick, practiced fingers, never a mark on that particular stretch of skin.

"Mom," I said slowly. "Where did that scar come from?"

She followed my gaze, and for the briefest second, something in her expression went too still, too careful, before smoothing back into concern. "I’ve always had that," she said. "You’ve just never noticed."

I had noticed everything about her hands my entire life. I would have noticed that.

Something cold settled deep in my stomach, spreading outward.

"Mom," I said again, my voice shaking now. "What day is it?"

She answered without hesitation, a specific date rolling easily off her tongue.

My blood ran cold.

It wasn’t wrong by a day, or a week, or even a season. It was wrong by years, an entire stretch of time that made no sense at all layered against the age I knew I was, the memories I could still feel sitting whole and undamaged in my mind.

I looked up at her again, really looked, and this time I noticed something I hadn’t let myself see before.

Her eyes weren’t quite right. The color was correct, the shape familiar, but something behind them sat too flat, too fixed, like a painting of my mother’s eyes rather than the eyes themselves.