Jane's POV
The slam of the heavy oak doors felt less like wood hitting wood and more like a guillotine dropping on my life.
The moment Jay walked out, the air in the room turned entirely to ice. I stood frozen in the exact spot where she had last looked at me. Her final expression was burned into my retinas—not an expression of anger, or fury, or the fiery defiance I had grown up with. It was cold. It was the face of a stranger who looked right through me and saw absolutely nothing.
What did I just do?
The question didn't just whisper in my mind; it roared, deafening and violent. My chest heaved as panic tore through my throat. I had lied. I had stood right in front of my twin sister, the person whose soul was knitted to mine before we were even born, and I had looked her in the eye and crafted a monumental, devastating lie.
I told her I knew. I told her I knew about the plan, about the bet, about the sick, twisted game Section E had been playing with our hearts.
I did it because I wanted her to be free.
A dark, ugly part of me—a part I hated acknowledging—had clawed its way to the surface in that split second. For months, I have seen Jay carring the suffocating weight of being the stable one, the protective one, the sister who had to keep me anchored to the earth while she battled her internal demons and scars even though I was older than her.
I was so tired. I see my failure as older sister seeing her holding the shield over both of our heads. When the truth exploded in that room, my survival instinct took over in the worst way possible.
Because if I told her I didn't knew , she would lost herself. I was so scared that Jay would start handling everything all by herself from now on.
I knew her better than anyone. If she realized I was also in this betrayal, she would shut down her heart, pull on her armor, and take the entire burden of this wreckage onto her own fractured shoulders. She would protect me, she would handle the fallout, and she would bleed internally without letting a single person see.
I couldn't let her do that. I couldn't handle the thought of her completely isolating herself from me.
Then I lied that I knew everything. And I am ok with it.
It meant I didn't need saving. It meant I could step away from the burning wreckage of our lives and finally, selfishly, breathe on my own.
But looking at the empty doorway, the absolute horror of my selfishness settled heavily in my stomach like lead.
And with it came a terrifying, sharp panic.
The silence in the room was suffocating. Dozens of eyes were on me, but my gaze slowly drifted to the right. There he stood. Yuri.
The boy who had promised me the stars while digging a grave right beneath my feet.
The numbness shattered, replaced by a white-hot, blinding spike of adrenaline. I didn't think. I didn't calculate. I lunged forward, my boots skidding against the polished floor, and threw my entire weight into my right fist
BANG.
My knuckles collided squarely with Yuri's jaw. The impact reverberated up my arm, a sharp, clean pain that did nothing to dull the agony in my chest.
Yuri staggered backward, his head snapping to the side, his hand flying up to cup his bruising cheek. He didn't retaliate. He didn't even look angry. He just looked at me with hollow, pathetic pity.
"Why did you do that?!" I screamed, my voice cracking, tearing at the seams. "Why did you do that, Yuri?!"
Before he could answer, the dam broke. The tears came rushing out so fast and hard that my vision instantly blurred into a smear of harsh lights and guilty faces.
My knees trembled violently. I collapsed onto the floor, my hands digging into my knees as sob after sob ripped out of my chest. It felt like my lungs were collapsing.
Through the roaring sound of my own weeping, Mayo's voice cut through the air. It wasn't cruel; it was profoundly confused, laced with a strange, searching sadness.
"Why are you crying, Jane? You... you knew about it, right? You just told Jay you knew."
I snapped my head up, my hair tangled across my tear-streaked face. "I fucking didn't know anything about it!" I shrieked, the profanity burning my throat.
A sharp gasp echoed through the room.
Aries stepped forward, his brow furrowed, his eyes wide with a mix of shock and dawning horror. "Then why did you say that, Jane? Why the hell would you lie about something like that to your own sister?"
"Because if Jay came to know that I didn't know, she would have broken even more!" I bellowed at him, my voice echoing off the high ceilings.
I shook my head wildly, trying to wipe the blinding tears from my eyes, but they wouldn't stop. "Don't you get it?! You don't know her like I do! If she saw me collapse, if she saw me break down over Yuri's betrayal, she would have buried her own agony deep down inside herself. She would have hidden her own crying just to console me! She would have played the strong one to protect my feelings, even while her own heart was bleeding out!"
I gripped my head in my hands, pulling at my hair as the absolute weight of my failure crushed me into the floorboards. I had completely lost control.
"I thought... I thought if I told her I already knew, it would take the burden off her," I whispered, my voice breaking down into a pathetic whimpering mess. "I thought if she believed I wasn't hurt, she would finally feel safe enough to open up to me. I thought she would let her guard down and pour out her feelings, and we could heal together. But I messed up. God, I completely messed it up..."
A soft, warm hand settled gently on my trembling shoulder. I didn't need to look up to know who it was. The faint scent of lavender and maternal warmth enveloped me as Tita Serina knelt down into the dirt beside me. Her face was a mask of profound sorrow, her eyes shining with unshed tears.
"Baby..." Tita Serina said quietly, her voice a fragile lullaby of grief. "You shouldn't have said that. Jay was completely broken at that exact moment... and she needed you the most."
"I know, Tita. I know I messed up," I choked out, leaning into her touch like a drowning child reaching for a lifeline. "I just wanted to make her feel like I was okay. I wanted to be the strong one for once. But something else happened... did you see her face? Did you hear her voice? This is the first time in our entire lives that Jay has ever talked to me this coldly. It was like... like she didn't even recognize me."
I pulled away from Tita Serina, my tear-filled eyes scanning the room until they landed on Keifer. He was standing perfectly still, like a statue carved from pure guilt, his hands clenched into fists so tight his knuckles were white.
"Why did you do that?" I demanded, stumbling to my feet, pointing a trembling, accusatory finger at his chest. "Why, Keifer?! Answer me! Out of everyone, I trusted you with her! I watched her smile again because of you. I genuinely thought you were the one who might finally bring Jay out of her scars. I thought, finally, through you, I will be able to see my sister again. My real sister, the one who wasn't afraid of the world."
Keifer swallowed hard, his jaw tight, but he kept his eyes locked on mine, absorbing every ounce of my wrath.
"But today..." My voice dropped to a devastating, hollow whisper. "...today I realized I lost my sister forever. And it's because of you."
I turned my gaze back to Yuri. The boy I had spent months defending. The boy I had stayed up late thinking about, dreaming about, planning a future with.
"I loved you," I said, the words tasting like ash on my tongue. "Really. Truly, Yuri. Jay begged me to stay away from you. She warned me. She saw right through you from the very beginning, but I was so blind, so stupidly infatuated. I still chose you over her warnings. And this... this is what you give me in return? A bet? A game?"
Yuri flinched, his eyes dropping to the floor. For the first time since I met him, he looked entirely powerless.
Finally, I swept my gaze across the entire perimeter of the room, looking at every single face standing under the banner of Section E. The people we called our classmates. The people we considered our circle.
"Why did you all do this?" I asked, my voice trembling with a profound, bone-deep exhaustion. "Me and Jay... we never did anything to hurt you. Not once. Every single time Section E needed something, every time any of you were in trouble, we stood by you. We always helped you. Still, you all sat back and watched this happen. You turned our lives into an amusement park.
No one answered. The silence of Section E was their loudest confession.
I couldn't breathe in that room anymore. The air felt toxic, thick with the stench of lies and broken promises. Turning on my heel, I sprinted out of the room, my footsteps tearing down the corridor. I burst through the exit doors into the cool, damp night air, running blindly until I reached the parking lot.
I threw open the door of the car, slamming myself into the passenger seat. I buried my face in my hands against the dashboard, the tears soaking into my skin.
Where is Jay? My mind screamed in a frantic loop. Where did she go? I hope she's okay. Please, God, let her be okay.
The driver's side door opened, and a heavy presence shifted into the seat beside me. I didn't look up. I knew the scent of leather and rain anywhere. It was Aries. He didn't say a word; he just placed his hands on the steering wheel, his breathing heavy and ragged.
"You should have stayed by her side, Aries," I said quietly, my voice barely audible over the sound of my own shallow breathing. "You were the only one who didn't play a part in this. You should have gone after her."
Aries didn't offer an excuse. He simply gripped the steering wheel tighter, turned the key in the ignition, and the engine roared to life. He shifted the car into drive and slammed on the gas, tearing out of the parking lot into the dark, unforgiving night, searching for the sister I had just pushed away.
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Jay's POV
My feet slammed against the cold asphalt, but I couldn't feel them. In fact, I couldn't feel much of anything except the violent, erratic thumping of my heart against my ribs.
Just minutes ago, I was trapped in a completely different reality.
When Keifer had pulled me into his space, when his lips had crashed against mine, the entire universe had simply ceased to exist. I remember the exact sensation of it—the warmth of his hands anchoring me, the desperate, fierce tenderness of his mouth.
In that brilliant, blinding second, I forgot everything. I forgot the pain of the past, I forgot the walls I had spent years building around my fragile psyche, and I forgot the lingering fear that always whispered I wasn't enough. I responded to him with everything I had left in my soul, pouring my unspoken fears and hidden hopes into that single kiss.
And then, he confessed.
He spoke words of love and devotion, and when I looked up into his eyes, I didn't see the arrogant, calculating leader of Section E. I saw pure, unadulterated dedication. For a beautiful, terrifying moment, I believed him entirely. I let myself sink into his lap, feeling safer than I had ever felt in my entire life.
But peace is a luxury girls like me aren't allowed to keep
Right there, sitting in his lap with his arms wrapped securely around me, a memory violently tore its way through my mind. It was a memory from yesterday afternoon. An overheard conversation that I had desperately tried to scrub from my brain, hoping against hope that I had somehow misheard, or that it was some sick, out-of-context joke.
I had been walking past the old music room when I heard Keifer and Yuri talking inside.
"We should tell them," Keifer's voice had drifted through the cracked door, tight and strained.
"What?" Yuri had responded, sounding defensive, almost annoyed.
"That we made a plan to make them fall in love with us and then ruin them just to get back at Aries," Keifer had said, each word sounding like a heavy blow. "And the worst part is, the whole of Section E knows about it. They've known since day one. We need to tell them, Yuri. As soon as possible."
"Yeah... we should," Yuri had muttered back, his tone hollow. "Before they find out from someone else."
Standing outside that door yesterday, the world had stopped spinning. The shock had been so total, so absolute, that my brain had gone entirely numb to protect itself. I knew Jane truly, deeply loved Yuri. I knew she had handed her heart to him on a silver platter.
And worse... I knew that, somehow, against every single defensive instinct I possessed, I had fallen completely in love with Keifer.
Sitting in his lap just moments ago, looking at the man who had just confessed his love to me, the realization hit me with the force of a freight train:
I can't let him know.
I couldn't let him know that he had won. I couldn't let him see that his twisted plan had worked perfectly, that I was just another stupid, broken girl who had fallen into his trap. The pride that had kept me alive through years of trauma flared up like a defensive wall of fire.
So, I lied.
I looked at him, forced a smirk onto my face, and told him I knew the plan all along. I told him I was just playing along with the game.
But the victory was entirely hollow. The exact moment those words left my mouth, Keifer looked down. The supreme confidence drained from his face, replaced by a raw, crushing guilt so profound it made him look physically ill.
Watching his shoulders slump, watching the light die in his eyes as the weight of his own sins crushed him... my heart didn't just break. It shattered into a thousand jagged pieces of ice. He wasn't supposed to look that hurt.
If it was just a game to him, why did he look like I had just executed him?
The confusion and agony had driven me into a frenzy. I couldn't stay in his arms for another second. I had hurried across the room to Jane, grabbing her arm, desperate to drag her away from the den of vipers. I needed my sister. I needed my twin, my anchor, the one person in this world who was safe.
"Come on, Jane, we're leaving," I had told her.
But then Jane had looked at me with those wide, tearful eyes and delivered the final, fatal blow. She told me she already knew about the plan. She said Yuri had confessed to her earlier, and... she had given him chance.
She is ok with him.
That statement was the definitive end of my world. Jane's betrayal didn't just hurt; it hit me the hardest out of everything. She was my twin sister.
We shared a heartbeat before we even breathed air. We had a sacred, unwritten rule: we never hid anything from each other. We survived our darkest family secrets by being entirely transparent. But she hid this.
She knew Section E was actively trying to ruin us, she knew the boy I was falling for was playing a sick game with my mind, and she kept it a secret because she wanted to protect her own little fantasy with Yuri. She prioritized her relationship with a liar over her loyalty to her own blood.
Now, I was walking blindly through the dark streets, the city lights blurring into long, weeping streaks of neon yellow and red.
I didn't know where I was going. I didn't care. I just needed to put distance between myself and the wreckage of Section E. The cold night air slapped against my face, but my skin felt hot, flushed with a feverish, agonizing grief.
My right hand felt strange—warm and sticky. I lifted it up into the dim glow of a flickering streetlamp. It was covered in dark, crimson blood. During the confrontation, or perhaps when I had slammed my hand against the table to force myself away from Keifer, something had sliced deep into my palm.
The blood was leaking steadily down my wrist, dripping onto the concrete below like a morbid clock ticking away the seconds of my sanity.
But I couldn't bring myself to care. I couldn't look at it for more than a second. What was a little pain compared to the absolute slaughterhouse inside my chest?
Jane lied to me. Keifer used me. Section E knew it all along.
The words repeated in my head over and over, a cruel rhythm to match the pace of my steps. I was just walking. Just moving forward into the dark, empty void of the night, hoping that if I walked fast enough, I could somehow outrun the pain.
Then, there was a bright flash of high beams.
The screech of burning tires pierced through the quiet night air.
Boom.
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Jane's POV
The car ride was an agonizing exercise in silence. Aries kept his foot planted firmly on the accelerator, the engine whining as we tore through the downtown grid. My eyes were glued to the passenger side window, my hands gripping the edge of the seat so hard my fingernails were nearly digging through the fabric.
"Where could she have gone, Aries?" I asked, my voice cracking, a fresh wave of tears spilling over my eyelashes. "She doesn't go anywhere when she's like this. She usually just... shuts down in her room. But she left the building on foot. She doesn't have her keys."
Aries didn't break his stare from the road, but his jaw muscle flexed violently. "She's running, Jane. When Jay gets pushed past her limit, she doesn't think. She just runs until her lungs burn out."
"It's my fault," I wept, pressing my forehead against the cool glass of the window. "I should have just told her the truth. I was just so scared of seeing her break... but I ended up breaking her myself."
"We're going to find her," Aries said, his voice deep and steady, though I could hear the subtle tremor of panic underneath his tough exterior. "We have to."
We rounded a sharp corner near the old industrial district, the tires chirping against the pavement. The streets here were dimly lit, lined with warehouses and fading streetlights.
It was the exact kind of isolated, quiet place Jay would seek out when the noise of the world became too loud to bear.
Suddenly, a massive sound echoed from two blocks ahead.
It wasn't the sound of an engine. It was a horrific, metallic crunch—the unmistakable, violent impact of steel meeting steel, followed by the shattering of safety glass that sounded like a thousand tiny bells ringing in the dark.
My heart completely stopped. The blood in my veins turned to absolute liquid ice.
"Aries..." I whispered, the word dying in my throat.
Aries didn't even reply. He slammed his foot on the gas, the car rocketing forward. We flew over a small crest in the road, and the headlights of our vehicle illuminated a scene straight out of a nightmare.
In the middle of the intersection, a black sedan was stopped at an unnatural angle, its front bumper completely caved in, smoke pouring from underneath the crushed hood. And there, lying on the cold, dark asphalt a few yards away from the vehicle, was a small, motionless figure.
"JAY!" I shrieked.
Before Aries could even bring the car to a complete halt, I threw the passenger door open. The momentum nearly dragged me under the wheels, but I didn't care. I stumbled onto the pavement, my boots skidding as I sprinted wildly toward the intersection.
"Jay! Jay, please! No, no, no, please God, no!"
I dropped to my knees beside her limp body, the rough asphalt tearing through my jeans, but I felt absolutely nothing. Jay was lying on her side.
Her beautiful, long dark hair was tangled across her face, matted with dirt and a terrifying streak of dark red blood spreading from her temple. Her eyes were closed, her long eyelashes cast in shadow against her deathly pale skin.
"Jay, look at me, please open your eyes!" I screamed, my hands hovering over her body, trembling so violently I was terrified to touch her, terrified that if I moved her, I would break whatever was left.
I noticed her right hand. It was curled loosely on the pavement, smeared with a mixture of fresh and drying blood. She had been bleeding before the car even hit her. She had been hurting, alone in the dark, and I hadn't been there.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," I sobbed, finally gathering her upper body into my arms, pulling her head onto my lap. I pressed my hand against her cheek—it was freezing cold. "I lied to you, Jay. I didn't know about the plan. I swear to you, I didn't know anything! I just wanted to be strong for you... please don't leave me. You can hate me forever, you can never speak to me again, just please don't die!"
Aries appeared beside me, falling to his knees with a heavy thud. His face was completely devoid of color, his hands shaking as he pulled out his phone, his voice barking coordinates at an emergency dispatcher.
But his eyes never left Jay's face. For the first time since I had known him,
Aries looked entirely terrified."She's breathing," Aries said, his voice thick with a choked sob as he pressed two fingers against the side of her neck. "Jane, she's breathing. But it's shallow. We need an ambulance right now."
I held my twin sister tight against my chest, my tears dripping onto her pale forehead, washing away the dirt on her skin. Looking down at her fragile form, the absolute terror clawed at my heart again.
If she wakes up, will she ever let me help her again? Or will she start handling everything on her own, completely shutting me out of her life?
The world around us faded into a blur of flashing red and blue lights in the distance, but all I could feel was the agonizingly slow, fragile rise and fall of her chest.
I had wanted herto be free of my responsibility. But looking at my sister's broken body, I realized the terrifying truth: If I lose her ,there was only darkness.
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A/n
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