To Love You Was to Hate You

Lilith's POV

“Sign it,” I said.

Then a gust pushed through the curtains and sent the divorce papers scattering across the floor.

In one quick motion, he tore my dress open, revealing the steel prosthetic that flashed in the moonlight.

“Lilith.” He plucked the cigarette from my mouth. Our prosthetic limbs gleamed side by side in the silver light.

“There are no two people better suited for each other than you and me,” he said.

After all that, he didn’t sign.

For a week, there was no trace of that girl, no name, no lead, only a single name from Sebastian’s journals: Aurora Langley.

Then suddenly, she showed up at my door, impatient and brazen, wearing the same white dress, and as pale as in the footage. The only difference was the bruised pink at the corners of her eyes and the red marks across her neck and chest, which were marks of something more intimate.

Pressing her delicate hand to the small swell at her belly, she announced, “I’m pregnant, and it's his.”

My pen stopped midline on the financial report in front of me, while she sat down in the guest chair facing me as if she owned the place.

“You saw it yourself. Back when I was still in school, my name was in his diary,” she said. “He loves me, not you. If you can’t accept that, I’ll move in with my private medical team. Now, tell me, with me like this, who do you think Sebastian will throw out? You or me?”

The guest chair toppled with a dull crash, followed by the girl’s startled cry as I slapped her.

“You dare hit me!” she shrieked, rubbing the soft pink at her eye. The color flared into a raw red.

I smiled. Sebastian had guarded her well, so this fall, this humiliation, was probably the worst she’d ever known.

“So you came in alone to stage a takeover?” I said, closing the distance between us.

She collapsed to the floor, terror finally plain in her eyes as I advanced.

“Don’t... don’t come any closer!” she barked, her voice breaking.

Her panic stirred something inside me.

As I stood over her and looked into her tear-filled eyes, something clicked.

She was like me.

She was like the girl in the blood-soaked white dress from the night our enemies slaughtered my mother and uncles, the eighteen-year-old who had fallen to the ground and scaredly told them not to come closer. Her scream was the same as mine had been that night.

I grabbed a fistful of her hair, making her scream. Then, I noticed that her scream was identical to the sound I’d made when I was eighteen.

As her neck had been exposed, I unmistakably saw a butterfly-shaped birthmark on it.

So, Sebastian had really found a version of me, huh?

Without my noticing, tears slipped free from my eyes.

He had found a girl whose leg hadn’t been broken, whose birthmark hadn’t been removed, who’d never been through the bloody storms I had.

Looking at the soft curve of her belly, I laughed.

“You think that makes you better than me?” I said, raising the dagger.

Her terrified scream echoed my own from years before.

Unfortunately, the blade didn't reach her unborn child as Sebastian came.

He held the knife, and drops of blood slid down its blade.

“Sebastian!” Aurora cried out.

He stood between us as if he’d done this a thousand times before, natural, protective.

The dagger trembled between both our hands, neither moving an inch.

Glaring at me, he coldly said, “Don’t touch her.”

For a moment, everything felt like it had folded back to that night when the frightened, crying Lilith first met a boy who pressed his hand over the blade aimed at her. Back then, the dagger had pierced his chest and left a pale line across his palm.

Now, I sliced that scar open with my movement, and the old wound bled anew.