The weight of the velvet curtains were closed tight against the windows. As blocked out the afternoon sun and plunged the Duke’s private study into a suffocating twilight.

  The air in the room was stale. It smelled of old books and dust.

  "It is madness, Theo! You are speaking treason." Kaelen shouted

  Kaelen paced a tight circle on the luxurious rug, He frantically walked around. His hand rested on the hilt of his sharp metal sword. It was a nervous habit he had developed over the last past years.

  "We agreed on this." Kaelen insisted, turning to the others. "We agreed it was just her disorder. It was caused by the trauma from that accident. That is all."

  Kaelen looked desperate as if he wanted to believe the lie he already knows.

  I sat in the high-backed leather chair near the fireplace. I was the only one seated. It was a small power dynamic I had established early in the meeting. By remaining comfortable while they paced and fretted, I controlled the tempo of the room.

  My posture was relaxed. My hands rested loosely in my lap.

  "Was it?" Theo’s voice quietly interjected.

  He stood by my father’s massive oak desk with his back to me. He was staring at a piece of scorched parchment he had on his hands.

  "Was it really trauma, Kaelen?" Theo asked softly. "Or was that just the story we told ourselves?"

  "We all knew, deep down. We just chose not to" Theo muttered.

  Theo turned his head slightly, just enough so I could see the profile of his face. He looked sad.

  "We have known since she was twelve" he said. "The girl who woke up from that fall was not the same person who fell.".

  I watched him. I analyzed the tension in his shoulders and the way his weight shifted to his left leg. He was preparing for a confrontation.

  This was an inconvenience.

  I had done this dance for eight years.

  Eight years ago, the real Seraphina D’Arden had fallen from a horse. She was twelve years old. She was loud, bratty, emotional, and entirely ordinary.

  When the fever took her.

  My eyes opened.

  In her place was me.

  I was a thirty five year old professional hitman. A ghost who had died in a hail of gunfire ontop of a building in a distinctively different world.

  I had to learn how to be a teenager. I had to learn how to be a noble. I had to perform the role of Seraphina.

  I threw tantrums when necessary. I acted shy at parties. I utilized "odd humors" and "mood swings" as cover for my lack of emotional engagement.

  They had all bought it. They clung to the diagnosis of "trauma" because the alternative was unthinkable. They rationalized my detachment as shock. They dismissed my successes as strange, eccentric luck.

  Until now.

  "Elara?" Kaelen pleaded.

  He turned to the girl huddled by the window seat. Elara clutched a leather bound book to her chest like a shield. She looked small and terrified.

  "Tell him, Elara" Kaelen said. "Tell him he’s just crazy. It is just Sera. She is... different, I know. But she is Sera."

  Elara flinched. She looked at Kaelen, and then her eyes slid over to me.

  There was a new expression in her gaze. It was not the usual sisterly adoration. It was uncertainty. It was fear.

  "Remember" she whispered. Her voice trembled. "Remember three years ago? At the summer in vermone?"

  During the summer in the estate, when the hunting party was being conducted. There was an incident with a white coated stag.

  "When that hunting wolf was pierced by the stag" Elara continued. "Do you remember?"

  I remembered it perfectly.

  My stag had been cornered. It was a magnificent beast, over four hundred pounds of muscle and instinct. The hounds had been foolish. One of them had lunged too early.

  My stag had lowered its head. It caught the wolf in the soft underbelly with a tine as sharp as a dagger.

  It was a clean, efficient strike. The antler punctured the abdominal wall, hooked upward, and severed the major arteries. The wolf was dead before it hit the ground, though the nerves kept it twitching.

  "We all ran" Elara said. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled over her cheeks. "We were screaming. I was crying so hard I couldn't breathe. Kaelen dragged me away."

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  She looked at me. Her hands tightened on the book until her knuckles turned yellow.

  "You told us later you were frozen in fear" she said. "We believed you. We wanted to believe you."

  She swallowed hard.

  "But you were not frozen when I looked back."

  The room went very quiet.

  "You didn't cry" Elara whispered. "You didn't scream. You didn't even look away."

  She took a shuddering breath.

  "You just watched. You stood there with your hands behind your back and you watched the wolf die. You looked... interested. Like you were studying it."

  I kept my face perfectly neutral.

  Of course I was studying it. The stag had demonstrated a flawless defensive maneuver. After all, information is ammunition. You do not look away from a lesson just because it is messy.

  "That is not fair" Kaelen tried to argue "Shock affects people differently. Maybe she was dissociating."

  "No!" Theo slammed his palm onto the desk.

  The sound cracked through the room.

  "It is all of it!" Theo shouted.

  He finally spun around. His face was furious, flushed with adrenaline and anger. He looked directly at me.

  "Don't you see, Kaelen? It fits. It all fucking fits."

  He pointed a shaking finger at me.

  "All the 'incidents' we explained in our heads. The ones we laughed about."

  He took a step toward me.

  "The grain shipments" Theo said. "Two years ago. My father's spymaster insisted the northern route was secure. He had reports. He had witnesses. And Seraphina looked at the map for five seconds and knew he was lying."

  "She was guessing" Kaelen said weakly. "She said the numbers-"

  "It was not a guess!" Theo snapped. "It was calculation. I looked at those ledgers later. The discrepancy was buried in the travel times. It would have taken a seasoned logistics officer days to find it. She found it in seconds."

  I remained motionless in the chair. I did not blink. I did not defend myself.

  He was right. The spymaster had been sloppy. He had padded the travel time by twelve percent to account for a graft scheme. It was an amateur mistake.

  "And the assassin" Theo continued. His voice dropped, becoming darker. "Lord Morlag's man. The one found dead in the canals."

  "That was an accident" Kaelen said. "He fell and broke his neck."

  "He fell?" Theo laughed. "A professional killer 'fell' in the exact way needed to snap his second vertebrae? And where was Seraphina when it happened? She had wandered off to look for what?"

  Theo stared at me. His eyes were wide and pleading, begging me to deny it. Begging me to give him an excuse to stop.

  "We- No, I thought you were suffering" he said. "I thought you were a victim. I thought the world and I had broken you and I just wanted to..."

  He looked down, closing his eyes worryingly before looking back at my eyes with a new found conviction.

  "But you were never broken. You have been managing us. You have been handling us like assets. Like a wolf hiding in a flock of sheep."

  He turned back to the desk held up the scorched parchment paper he had been holding.

  "I received this three days ago" Theo said. "My source in the capital risked his life to get it out of the burning archives of the black sanctum."

  He looked at the paper, then at me.

  "The text speaks of a ritual. A summoning gone wrong. It speaks of a fever that burns away the soul and leaves the vessel empty."

  "Stop it" Kaelen whispered. "Please stop."

  Theo ignored him.

  "The source claims that the real Seraphina died in that bed eight years ago" Theo said. His voice was steady now, grounded in the horror of his own conclusion. "He says the thing that woke up... the thing that has been living with us, eating at our table, laughing with Seraphina's voice... is just wearing her face."

  He took a breath.

  "The report gave a name. A designation from a tongue that should not exist here."

  "She called you Viper."

  My mind stuttered for a fraction of a second.

  Viper.

  That word.

  That name.

  It was my name.

  A wave of exhaustion crashed over me. I was tired.

  For eight years of this. Eight years of holding myself. Eight years of pretending to be a child, then a teenager, then a young woman. Eight years of giggling at bad jokes, of curtsying to idiots, of managing these people like fragile pieces on a chess board.

  And the worst part is that it bleeds through me.

  The lines were blurring. I felt it every day. The original Seraphina’s memories were still in my head. Her childish laughter. Her genuine fondness for Kaelen. Her crush on Theo. They had started seeping back in, mixing with the cold oil of my own psyche.

  I wasn't just a ghost in a shell anymore I am being muddled and turned into a monstrous hybrid.

  Even I didn't know exactly who I was supposed to be in this very moment. Was I the killer? Or was I the girl who felt a twinge of pity for the boy breaking down in front of her?

  But this name... this was a direct threat.

  For the first time in eight years, I dropped the mask. Or perhaps, the mask just evaporated because I no longer had the energy to hold it up.

  I gave them nothing.

  I did not flinch. I did not gasp. I did not cry out in denial. I did not look at Kaelen for support.

  I simply sat there.

  I rested my head against the back of the leather chair. I looked at Theo with eyes that were tired.

  I met his gaze and I held it.

  The silence in the room stretched out. It grew heavy and thick. It suffocated the last dying embers of their hope.

  For the first time they had saw not seraphina but a stranger.

  A normal girl would be screaming. A wrongfully accused victim would be weeping. A confused child would be asking what was happening.

  I did none of those things. I simply waited for the next move.

  Kaelen saw it. His hand, the one resting on his sword hilt, began to shake uncontrollably. He took a step back, away from me. The denial died in his eyes, replaced by a dawning, horrific realization.

  Elara was openly crying now, sobbing into her hands. She curled tighter into the window seat, trying to make herself invisible.

  Theo’s face crumpled.

  He had won the argument. He had proven his theory. But there was no victory in his expression. There was only grief.

  He looked at the girl he thought he grew up with. The fiery, sharp tongued, passionate girl he had sworn to protect.

  And he realized he was looking at a stranger. He was looking at a predator sitting in a chair.

  "Sera..." he whispered.

  His voice broke on the name.

  He took one more step toward me, eyes on mine searching for a sign of the girl he knew.

  "Seraphina..." he asked.

  "Are you really... you?"