I had begun to live carefully, as if one wrong step would collapse everything that still stood between us. Every day inside the mansion felt like walking a blade's edge—loyalty on one side, desire on the other, and blood waiting beneath both. I kept my distance from Rimora deliberately, even when it hurt, even when her eyes searched for me across corridors too wide and too quiet. I told myself I was doing the right thing. For Lbow. For the fragile bond that had survived poverty, grief, and humiliation. But every time I turned away from her smile, something inside me fractured a little more.
Work became my refuge and my punishment. I scrubbed silver until my hands burned, lifted crates until my muscles screamed, buried myself in labor so thoroughly that thinking became impossible. It was easier to exhaust my body than confront my heart. I told myself numbness was strength. That discipline would silence longing. But the nights betrayed me. When the mansion slept and my body finally collapsed, her face returned uninvited—soft, earnest, painfully alive. I woke drenched in guilt, my chest tight with the knowledge that I was betraying someone no matter which direction I chose.
Rimora felt the change long before she understood it. The distance between us did not arrive suddenly; it crept in, slow and suffocating, like a storm cloud that refused to break. Where once there had been long conversations and shared silences, now there were fragments—hurried words, eyes that met only briefly, moments stolen and abandoned too soon. She tried to pull me back, not with accusation but with patience, and that hurt more than anger would have. She sensed that my withdrawal was deliberate, not rejection but sacrifice, and that knowledge cut deep. For she had begun to imagine a future in me, something fragile yet radiant, and each step I took away felt like watching that future dissolve.
Lbow, meanwhile, lived inside his own confusion. He saw what neither of us dared speak aloud—the way Rimora softened when she looked at me, the way her silence grew intimate in my presence. Jealousy took root in him quietly, not as rage but as a persistent ache. He wanted to believe she could choose him, that wealth and stability could outweigh whatever silent gravity pulled her toward me. And yet, I stood there—his friend, his brother in everything but blood—unintentionally between them. Sometimes resentment flashed in his eyes, quickly buried beneath guilt. He hated himself for envying me, knowing how much I had already lost. And so he hesitated, torn between fighting for her or preserving me, his heart splitting slowly under the strain.
Amid all this, something darker began to surface—something none of us could fully name yet. Rimora noticed it first. At the café, whispers slipped through conversations like ghosts no one wanted to acknowledge: medical shipments diverted without explanation, laboratories placed under sudden military watch, deaths dismissed too easily as stress or coincidence. She collected these fragments quietly, her mind threading them together with unsettling precision. What emerged terrified her. The pattern echoed the old pandemic that had stolen her mother and unborn sibling—but this felt sharper, more controlled, as if designed rather than born.
She tried to speak of it. To me. To others. Her words were met with tired smiles and dismissive shrugs. People were exhausted by fear, desperate for normalcy, unwilling to look at another shadow. But Rimora could not unsee what she had seen. At night, alone in her small room, she wrote everything down—dates, names, inconsistencies. Pages filled with urgency, ink trembling beneath her hand. In the candle's flicker, she imagined herself standing before crowds, her voice unshaken, warning them of what was coming. In those moments, she was the leader she dreamed of becoming. The president. The protector. But dawn always stripped the vision away, leaving her a café worker surrounded by indifference.
I could not fully ignore her, no matter how hard I tried. There were moments when our paths crossed and she spoke—quietly but fiercely—about what she had found. I listened. I always listened. Part of me believed her without hesitation, because I trusted her mind, her instinct, her courage. But another part of me recoiled. I was already carrying too much—my mother's death, Blue's absence, my own chains. To believe her fully meant accepting another weight, another responsibility, another reason to fight when I was already barely standing. I warned her gently to be careful, to not draw attention. And every time I walked away, regret burned in my chest, because what I wanted was to stay—to stand beside her, to shield her from both the world and the truth she was uncovering.
The triangle between us deepened, raw and unhealed. Rimora reached for me, and I denied myself for Lbow. Lbow yearned for Rimora, unaware that her heart had already chosen. And I punished myself by choosing no one, convinced that self-denial was the only honorable path. What should have been friendship curdled into tension. What should have been clarity dissolved into silence. And inside that silence, fractures spread.
Behind those fractures, Rimora's warnings lingered—unheard, unaddressed, but impossible to erase. Like thunder rolling beneath clear skies.
As days bled into weeks, we drifted further apart, our bond stretched thin by love, loyalty, and fear. Beyond the cities, beyond wealth and walls, something patient and merciless was gathering strength. For now, our hearts were consumed by personal loss. Soon, the world itself would be tested. And when that moment came, love would not be enough—only truth, courage, and the will to survive.