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Chapter 3 - Don't Vanish Like Cian

The moment they were gone, the silence they left behind was louder than the chaos that had preceded them. Kylian Hawkrige and his shadow had vanished into the Westmarch fog, but their presence lingered, a stain on the air, a chill that had nothing to do with the broken door.

The night seeped into the cottage, carrying with it the scent of damp earth and decay. It was the scent of their lives.

For a long moment, no one moved. They were four figures in a tableau of ruin, frozen by the aftershock. Aisling stood rigid, her hands fisted at her sides, the echo of her final, defiant words to Lord Hawkrige still tasting like acid and ash on her tongue.

Her father was the first to break. He let out a long, shuddering breath and staggered to a chair, collapsing into it. He ran a trembling hand over his face, and when he looked up, there was a delirious, desperate light in his eyes.

"We're saved," Tavien whispered, the words sounding obscene in the wreckage. "Aisling, do you see? He's saved us."

Aisling turned to him, a cold, venomous anger uncoiling in her gut. "Saved us?" she repeated, her voice dangerously low. "He put a collar around my neck and you call it a rescue."

"It's a marriage!" her father insisted, his voice rising with a frantic edge. He gestured wildly at the room. "To a Hawkrige! The debts will be gone. The Council will leave us be. Eireen will have a proper physician. This is… this is a miracle." He was trying to sell the fantasy to himself, to paint over the ugly truth with gold leaf.

"It is a transaction," Aisling shot back, her words like daggers. "He saw something in this house he wanted to own, and you were more than happy to help him wrap it in a bow. Don't you dare call this a miracle, Father. Call it what it is: the price of your mistakes."

The accusation struck him like a physical blow. He flinched, the relief on his face curdling into his familiar, hollow guilt. "I made those mistakes trying to provide for you! To give you a better life than this!"

"And look where it led us!" she cried, her voice finally breaking with the weight of it all. "To selling your daughter to a creature of the night to pay the bill!"

Throughout the bitter exchange, her mother had remained unnervingly still, her back to them as she held Eireen. But now, a sound escaped her. A choked, guttural sob that seemed torn from the deepest part of her soul.

Aisling's anger faltered, replaced by a stunned confusion. She had seen her mother furious, seen her cold, seen her weary beyond measure. But she had not seen her weep like this since the day they learned Cian was truly gone.

Elenya turned slowly, her face pale and streaked with tears, her iron composure shattered into a million pieces. Her eyes were not on Aisling, but fixed on the empty doorway, as if she could still see the ghost of the man who had stood there.

"Mother?" Aisling asked, her voice softening despite herself. "What is it?"

Her mother shook her head, a gesture of profound, ancient sorrow. "That name," Elenya whispered, her voice trembling. "Kylian Hawkrige."

"You know him," Aisling stated. It wasn't a question. The recognition in her mother's grief was too raw, too personal.

Elenya finally met Aisling's gaze, her eyes swimming with unshed history. "I… I knew him. A lifetime ago." She clutched Eireen tighter, as if the child could anchor her to the present. "Before the blight took his family. Before the curse. Before…" Her voice broke. "Before he became what he is now."

Aisling stared at her, the foundations of her world tilting once more. The deal had been a nightmare of the present, but her mother's words hinted at a far older one. A ghost in their bloodline she never knew existed. "What do you mean? What curse?"

"It doesn't matter," Elenya said, already rebuilding her walls, brick by painful brick. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, her expression hardening again into that familiar mask of stern resignation. "What's done is done. The deal is made."

"It matters to me!" Aisling insisted, stepping closer. "If I am to be shackled to this man, I deserve to know the history that binds our families!"

"His family is cursed, Aisling! That is all you need to know!" her mother snapped, her fear turning back into anger. "They are damned, and now… now he has come back."

The implication was terrifying. He hadn't chosen them at random. This wasn't a coincidence. This was a reckoning of some kind, for a debt much older than coin.

Aisling felt dizzy, the room closing in on her. The smoke, the secrets, the suffocating weight of a past she never knew was hers to bear. She needed air. She needed to escape the prison of her parents' grief and guilt.

She turned and saw Eireen looking at her, her small face a canvas of pure, unadulterated fear. Her sister's terror cut through everything else. Aisling crossed the room in two strides and knelt before her, taking her small, cold hands.

"Aisling," Eireen whispered, her voice thin and frail, like a bird's wing. "Don't go."

"Oh, sweetling," Aisling murmured, her heart aching. She smoothed a stray strand of hair from Eireen's forehead. "I have to. It's the only way to… to fix this. To make sure you get well."

Eireen's grip tightened on her hands, her knuckles white. "But you'll be gone. Like Cian." The name was a ghost on her lips. "He said he'd come back, too."

Aisling felt the words like a physical wound. She pulled her sister into a fierce hug, burying her face in Eireen's hair, trying to anchor herself to the one pure, uncomplicated love in her life. This was why. This small, warm, trembling body in her arms was the reason she had sold her future.

"Listen to me," Aisling said, pulling back to look into her sister's wide, intuitive eyes. "I am not Cian. I will not vanish. Do you hear me?"

Eireen just stared at her, a tear tracing a path through the grime on her cheek.

"Promise me," Eireen pleaded, her voice cracking. "If you leave, promise me you'll come back. Promise me you won't vanish like Cian."

The weight of the promise was heavier than any iron shackle. It was a vow sealed against the backdrop of their deepest loss. "I promise," Aisling whispered, her own voice thick with emotion. "I swear it."

She finally let go and stood, turning her back on her parents. She couldn't look at them. She couldn't bear her father's pathetic relief or her mother's haunted sorrow. She walked down the short, dark hall to her own room and closed the door, shutting them out.

Her room was small, cold, and blessedly silent. The moonlight slanted through the single window, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. It fell upon the cracked mirror hanging on the wall, a looking glass she'd had since she was a child. An old, silvered thing, a family heirloom, webbed with fine black lines like a captured spiderweb.

She approached it slowly, as if it were a hostile stranger. The girl who stared back at her was a ghost. Her auburn hair was a wild tangle, her face pale and smudged with soot. But it was her eyes that held her captive. They were her own emerald green, but they looked wider, darker, haunted by the reflection of a fire she hadn't known she possessed and a future she hadn't chosen.

She was a pawn. A piece moved on a board by her father's folly, her mother's secrets, and a vampire's ancient agenda. Every ounce of her being, the fiery, independent spirit that her mother had tried so hard to tame, rebelled against the sheer helplessness of it. They had made this decision for her. Her father, by his weakness. Her mother, by her silence. And Kylian Hawkrige, by his power.

She raised a trembling hand and touched the cold surface of the mirror, her fingertips tracing the cracks. She saw the fear in her own reflection. She saw the girl being led to slaughter.

And she hated her.

A new strength, born of pure, unadulterated rage, flooded through her. It pushed back the fear. It burned away the despair. Her expression hardened, the trembling in her hand ceased.

The girl in the mirror was no longer a victim. She was a survivor. She was a storm gathering its strength.

Aisling leaned in closer, her breath fogging the glass, her eyes locked on her own. She would not be a passive sacrifice on the altar of her family's mistakes. She would take their decision and forge it into a weapon.

She whispered the words to the girl in the mirror, a vow spoken into the heart of the night.

"I'll make this my choice. Not theirs."

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