Jay's POV
The world did not end with a loud, world-shattering crash. It ended with a heavy, suffocating silence that swallowed the entire universe whole.
I felt myself floating somewhere in a strange, empty gray space between the hard asphalt and the dark, starless night sky. I could no longer feel the freezing cold ground pressing against my back.
I could no longer feel the terrifying, burning warmth of my own blood leaking onto the dark road. My body did not belong to me anymore. It felt exactly like a heavy, soaked winter coat that someone had roughly thrown off and left behind in the dirt.
But I could still hear.
The sounds came to me slowly, like they were traveling through deep, freezing water. They were muffled and distorted at first, but then they became sharp, piercing, and painfully clear. It was a sob. A broken, ragged, breathless sound that cut right through the very center of my chest.
Jane.
"I didn't know, Jay! Please, please look at me! I swear to God I didn't know about the plan!" Jane's voice was completely hysterical, vibrating with a level of raw panic I had never heard from her before.
She was right beside me. I could feel the faint, desperate vibration of her hands shaking my shoulders, trying with all her might to pull me back into the living world. "I lied because I wanted to protect you! I wanted to be the strong one for once! Please don't leave me, Jay! I'm so sorry! Please don't die!"
The truth hit me, but surprisingly, it didn't hurt. The blinding anger I felt just minutes ago, the burning sense of betrayal that had made me blind to the world and run wildly into the street, completely evaporated into nothingness. The massive, tragic misunderstanding cleared up in an instant, leaving behind nothing but a profound, aching sadness.
She didn't betray me. My twin sister didn't choose Yuri over me. She wasn't laughing behind my back with the people who had broken my spirit. She was just trying to shield me from the pain, the exact same way I had always tried to shield her from the cruelties of the world. We had both lied out of love, and those love-fueled lies had broken us both.
Don't cry, Jane, I desperately wanted to say.
I tried to part my lips. I tried to reach my hand out to touch her wet, tear-stained cheek, to tell her that I wasn't angry anymore, that I understood, that I loved her. But my physical body was completely, utterly locked.
The electrical signals from my brain died completely before they could ever reach my muscles. I was a helpless prisoner inside my own cold skin.
Then, another presence hovered over me, blocking out the glare of the streetlights.
"Jay. Look at me, princess. Come on, look at your Kuya."
It was Aries. I forced my heavy eyelids to open just a tiny fraction. The blurred, distorted shapes slowly cleared, and I saw his face hovering above mine. His eyes were wide with a deep, primal terror I had never seen in him in my entire life.
But beneath that blinding fear, there was something else. Love. Real, raw, completely unshielded love.
For the first time in a very long time, he wasn't the distant, angry, stoic brother who kept everyone at arm's length to protect his own broken heart.
He looked exactly like he used to years ago. He looked like my Kuya Ari. The loving brother who used to protect us from every bad thing before our family fell apart.
"Kuya Ari is here, Jay," he whispered, his voice cracking completely. A single, rare, heavy tear slipped down his pale face and landed right on my forehead, mixing with my sweat and blood. "Don't leave me. Please, don't leave us. You have to stay strong. Hold on, Jay. The ambulance is coming. Just breathe for Kuya."
Hearing him call himself Kuya Ari again filled the empty, freezing spaces inside my chest with a sudden, overwhelming warmth. It was a beautiful warmth. I wanted to tell him I was trying.
I wanted to tell him I heard him, that I was staying, that I was happy he was back. But the bright light in his eyes began to flicker and dim. The edges of my vision started to fray, eaten away by a creeping, heavy, velvet darkness.
The warmth faded into a numbing chill. The sound of Jane's agonizing weeping grew incredibly distant, like music playing in another room at the end of a long hallway.
My chest felt impossibly heavy, as if a mountain were sitting on my lungs, and then, with one final, quiet, imperceptible sigh, my vision blanked out completely into absolute nothingness.
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Jane's POV
The heavy metal doors to the operating room slammed shut with a devastating, echoing thud, and the bright, blood-red "Surgery" light flared to life above them.
It felt like a physical blow to my chest. My legs gave out entirely, turning to water, and I dropped to my knees on the cold, highly polished hospital tile. The world around me was a chaotic blur of sterile white walls, the sharp, sickening smell of antiseptic, and the distant, rhythmic, uncaring ticking of a wall clock.
"Jay... please... don't do this..." I gasped, my trembling hands pressing tightly against my face. The guilt was a physical, heavy weight pressing down on my throat, suffocating me, stealing my air. It was my fault. It was all my fault.
If I hadn't told that stupid, , unnecessary lie in that room, she would have stayed with me. She would have held my hand. She wouldn't have run out into the dark, blind with tears. She wouldn't be on that cold metal table right now, fighting for her very breath.
A shadow fell over my collapsed form. A pair of strong, familiar arms reached down and pulled me up from the hard floor. I didn't even look up to see who it was.
I just threw my arms around his neck, burying my face deeply into his shoulder, sobbing until my chest ached and my throat burned.
It was Aries. He held me tightly, his grip steady, powerful, and unyielding, providing the only anchor I had in the middle of this living nightmare.
I felt a single, warm tear drop from his cheek onto my bare shoulder. But before I could even pull back to look at him, he quickly and roughly wiped it away with the back of his hand, hardening his facial expression back into a mask of pure, unfeeling steel. He had to be strong because I was completely, utterly shattered into a thousand pieces.
The quiet of the hallway did not last. The heavy double doors at the far end of the corridor burst open with a loud, violent rattle.
I pulled back slightly from Aries and saw them walking in. Angelo arrived first, his face completely pale and his jaw set in a grim, dangerous line.
Right behind him, walking in a silent, guilty cluster, was Section E.
Seeing their faces—the very people who had kept the secret, the people who had stood by and let Yuri and Keifer play with our lives and emotions for the sake of a petty bet—made a sudden, roaring fire burn through my grief.
I violently pushed away from Aries and took a hostile step forward, my tear-filled eyes flashing with absolute rage.
"Why the fuck are you here?!" I screamed, my voice cracking and echoing off the concrete walls of the hospital. "Haven't you done enough?! Get out! All of you, get the fuck out of here!"
The boys of Section E flinched as one, none of them daring to meet my eyes. They looked small, guilty, and broken. Except for Cin, who stepped forward from the front of the group with his hands raised in a calming, peaceful gesture, though his own face was filled with a deep, transparent worry.
"Jane, please, calm down," Cin said softly, his voice trembling slightly. "This is my family's hospital. My mom is the chief administrator here. She saw the emergency admission files come through, saw the name, knew Jay was my classmate, and she called me immediately. We didn't come here to cause trouble, Jane. I swear. We came because we care about her."
Angelo didn't say a single word to me or to Cin. His eyes were dark, like a storm brewing over the ocean. He marched straight past Section E, ignoring them completely, and walked over to Aries.
"What happened, Aries?" Angelo demanded, his voice dangerously low. "Explain it to me. Right now. Tell me everything."
Aries looked at Angelo, his jaw clenched so incredibly tight that a muscle violently twitched in his cheek. In a low, cold, monotone voice that sounded like ice cracking, Aries laid out the entire ugly truth. He told him about the bet.
He told him about Keifer and Yuri's disgusting plan to make us fall for them just to hurt them as a twisted revenge against him. He told him about how Section E had known about the plan from the very beginning and kept it a secret. He told him about the confrontation in the room, about my lie, and how Jay had run out into the night out of sheer, unadulterated heartbreak.
With every single word that left Aries' mouth, the air in the hallway grew heavier and more suffocatingly tense.
Angelo's face turned from a deathly pale to a dangerous, dark, furious red. The very moment Aries finished speaking, Angelo turned around on his heel. He didn't hesitate for a single second. He took three long, aggressive strides toward Keifer and threw a massive, shattering punch straight to Keifer's jaw.
Crack.
The sound of bone meeting bone echoed loudly in the sterile hallway. Keifer stumbled backward violently, his head snapping to the side as he collided heavily with the hard wall, but he didn't even lift a hand to try to defend himself.
Angelo didn't stop there. Driven by pure, protective instinct, he turned on his heel and delivered another vicious, heavy punch straight into Yuri's face. Yuri gasped loudly, staggering back several feet, bright red blood instantly rushing from his nose and pooling over his lips.
"Stay the fuck away from my sisters," Angelo snarled, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, protective fury that made the entire hallway shake. "If anything happens to Jay, I swear to God, neither of you will walk away from this hospital alive."
Before the boys could react or escalate the violence, Tita Serina quickly and firmly stepped between them, putting her body in front of Angelo, gently guiding him away before he could do any more physical damage.
She then walked over to me, wrapping her warm, comforting arms around my trembling shoulders, pulling me into a quiet corner of the waiting room.
"Shh, Jane. Breathe, sweetheart. Just breathe. Focus on Jay right now," Tita Serina whispered softly, rubbing my shaking back as I collapsed against her.
A few minutes later, the elevator doors at the end of the hall chimed smoothly. Raaki, Mica, Grace, Freya, and Ella rushed out into the hallway, their faces filled with absolute panic and disarray.
Raaki and Mica must have called the rest of the girls the very moment they heard the horrific news. They immediately swarmed around me, offering quiet, tearful words of comfort, but my brain was so numb I could barely process their physical presence.
I just sat in the hard plastic hospital chair, my head buried deeply in my hands, rocking back and forth like a broken doll. It's my fault. It's all my fault. If she dies, I die too. Please don't leave me alone in the dark, Jay.
"Why is my daughter here?!"
The sharp, demanding, incredibly loud shout completely shattered the low murmurs in the waiting room.
I froze instantly. That voice. It was a voice I recognized instantly, a voice from a dark past I had tried so incredibly hard to bury and forget.
I slowly lifted my heavy, tear-soaked head, praying with everything inside me that my mind was just playing a cruel, twisted trick on me.
It wasn't a dream or trick.
Walking down the hallway with an insufferable air of arrogant authority and dramatic panic was Jeana Fernandes. Our biological mother. The woman who had selfishly abandoned us years ago when we needed her most. The woman who let her husband hurt jay. She ignored her when she needed her most.
Walking right behind her was James Luca, her incredibly wealthy new husband, looking mildly uncomfortable and out of place, and beside him was Thomas Luca, their twenty-year-old son, who was looking around the hospital corridor with a detached, thoroughly serious expression.
Jeana spotted me sitting there and immediately rushed forward, her expensive high heels clicking loudly and aggressively against the polished tile floor.
She reached out with her manicured hands, trying to grab my shaking shoulders. "Jane! Oh my gosh, baby, what happened?! Why is my Jay in surgery? Tell me right now!"
The sheer, disgusting hypocrisy of her touch made my blood run entirely cold. A sudden wave of adrenaline hit me. I violently slapped her hands away, pushing her back, and jumped up from my seat to stand tall right in front of her.
"Don't you dare touch me!" I screamed, the pure venom in my voice surprising even the girls who were standing close to me. "You don't get to do this! You don't get to walk back in here after long years of silence and pretend like everything is okay! You don't get to play the worried, loving mother now!"
Jeana's face hardened instantly, her maternal, dramatic facade slipping for a fraction of a second to reveal her true pride. "Jane, watch your mouth! She is my daughter! I have a right to know!"
"Your daughter?!" I let out a bitter, mocking, hysterical laugh, tears streaming freely down my face. "Where the hell were you on that day twelve years then, huh? You abandoned Jay! You abandoed me ! You left Jay to fend for herself, to starve, to cry, and now you come here with your so-called mother drama? You have absolutely no right to be here! Get out!"
"You cannot talk to me like that!" Jeana shouted back, her voice rising to a sharp, angry pitch to match mine, her immense pride deeply wounded in front of her new husband, her son, and all of Section E. "I am the one who gave birth to you! I am your mother!"
"No, you are not their mother."
The voice came from the dark, far end of the corridor near the exit signs. It wasn't Angelo's voice, and it wasn't Aries' voice. It was deep, incredibly calm, and carried a ghostly, commanding weight that made the entire hallway instantly fall into a dead, terrified silence.
Everyone in the corridor turned to look at the same time.
Standing by the water cooler, dressed in a simple, dark utility jacket, was a young man. He had sharp, piercing blue eyes, a strong, unyielding jawline, and an unmistakable family resemblance that could not be denied.
My breath caught completely in my throat.
The girls gasped loudly. Angelo and Aries froze in place like they had literally seen a ghost rise from the grave. Behind them, Keifer, Yuri, and the rest of Section E looked absolutely paralyzed, their eyes wide with a mixture of profound disbelief and sheer, unadulterated terror.
It was a man who was supposed to be dead. A man whose tragic funeral they all wept at. A man whose absence had broken our family permanently.
"Kuya... Percy?" I whispered, my voice barely a breathless squeak.
Percy didn't look at anyone else in the crowded room. He kept his sharp eyes locked entirely on me. He took a few slow, deliberate steps forward, and the very moment he was close enough, I didn't care about the massive mystery, I didn't care about the lies, and I didn't care about the shocked people watching us. I threw my entire weight into his arms, gripping him fiercely.
"Kuya!" I sobbed hysterically, gripping his dark jacket with my fingers as if he might disappear into thin air like smoke if I let go for even a second.
Percy immediately wrapped his strong, solid arms around me, burying his face in my messy hair, holding me with a fierce, protective, brotherly grip that I thought I would never feel again. "Shh... calm down, princess. Kuya is here. I've got you. I'm right here."
"Kuya... Jay... she's in there... a car hit her... she's bleeding so much..." I stammered out through my frantic, gasping tears, pointing my shaking finger toward the operating room doors.
"Don't worry, princess. I am here now. She's going to be okay. I promise you," Percy said, his voice acting as a steady, unbreakable rock in the absolute middle of my chaotic, terrifying ocean.
He looked up over the top of my head, casting a cold, deadly, warning glare at Jeana and the Luca family, who stood frozen in absolute, pale-faced shock.
"Stay away from them or you will know why I'm a Mariano ", he warned.
Before anyone could speak up or demand a single explanation about how a dead man was currently standing in the hospital hallway, the heavy double doors of the operating room swung open with a loud click.
A doctor dressed in blue scrubs walked out slowly, pulling off his surgical mask. His face was tight with deep exhaustion and intense, professional worry.
"Are you the family of the patient, Jay?" the doctor asked, looking around the crowded, tense room.
Percy stepped forward immediately, still keeping one protective arm tightly around my shoulder. "Yes. I am her older brother. How is she, Doctor? Tell us."
The doctor sighed heavily, looking down at his clipboard with a troubled frown. "We are currently managing the internal bleeding from the severe trauma of the physical impact, but we have run into a very serious, unexpected complication. We need some immediate medical history from you all. Is the patient suffering from any underlying condition? Any type of chronic disease? Her heart rate is fluctuating dangerously, and her body isn't responding to our standard stimulants the way a healthy seventeen-year-old body should."
Angelo, Aries, and I all shook our heads instantly, completely confused.
"No," I said, wiping my eyes frantically. "She's healthy. She's always been healthy. She doesn't have any diseases."
"Yeah, Doctor, she does," Percy interrupted, his voice dropping into a somber, incredibly heavy, dark tone. "She is suffering from CVD. Cardiovascular Disease."
The entire hallway went completely, deathly silent.
The doctor's eyes widened in sudden surprise and realization. "Oh my gosh. Chronic cardiovascular disease? For how long has she been diagnosed?"
"The last two years," Percy replied quietly, his jaw tightening. "She has been taking heavy prescription medications for it secretly. I have the medical records if you need them."
I pulled away from Percy's side slowly, looking up at his face in absolute, horrified shock.
My mind began to spin at a terrifying speed. CVD? Two years? Secretly?
Jay and I were twins. We shared everything. We lived in the exact same room, slept in the same space, breathed the same air. How could she have been fighting a serious heart condition for two long years without me ever noticing a single thing? How much pain had she hidden from me?
The doctor nodded grimly, scribbling rapidly on his clipboard with a sense of urgency. "That explains the sudden, violent arrhythmia. Thank you, young man, this changes our medical approach in the operating theater immediately. We need to stabilize her cardiac output before we can finish closing up the internal injuries from the crash."
Without another word, he turned on his heel and rushed back through the double doors.
I grabbed Percy's jacket with both hands, my voice trembling with a new, even more, horrifying kind of fear. "Kuya... what is CVD? What does that mean? What is wrong with my twin sister? Tell me!"
Cin stepped forward slowly from the back of the group, his face completely pale as he looked at me with deep, profound sympathy. "Jane... CVD stands for Cardiovascular Disease. It's a general medical term for severe conditions that affect the heart or the blood vessels. It means her heart muscles are weakened, or her valves aren't working the way they are supposed to. In a major physical trauma , car accident... a heart with CVD can easily fail under the immense stress."
The words felt like a sudden, brutal death sentence dropped right onto my head.
My knees gave out completely for the second time. I collapsed heavily into a waiting room chair, my hands gripping my hair tightly as if to keep my head from exploding. "She's just seventeen years old..." I whispered, my voice breaking down into a pitiful, broken cry that sounded barely human."She's just seventeen years old...she carrie pain alone... and now her heart... I don't want to lose my sister! Please, God, don't take my sister away from me! Take me instead!"
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A/n
Percy has arrived now be ready for his warth and also for Jay's baddie era and Jane's Diva era.
Target for next chapter : 50+ comments 🎯
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