Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

I’m not sure I believe it myself

FARAH

Pain.

Blinding, absolute pain that feels like my skull is splitting open from the inside out.

I’m drowning in memories that aren’t mine—or maybe they are. I can’t tell anymore. Lifetimes are bleeding together, faces and names and deaths all piling on top of each other until I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t tell where Serapha ends and I begin.

I see myself in different bodies, wearing different faces, but always with the same terrible purpose burning in my chest. The Moon Goddess’s voice echoes through each memory, cold and beautiful and absolute:

“You are my instrument of balance. He grows too powerful, too dangerous. You must stop him.”

And every single time, I do. Every time, I kill him.

Poison slipped into his wine while he sleeps beside me, trusting and vulnerable. A blade driven between his ribs while he’s distracted by my kiss. Betrayal whispered in the ears of his enemies, leading them straight to his throat.

Seven times.

Seven different ways to destroy the man I’m supposed to love.

But this time, in these memories forcing their way through the barriers in my mind, I see more than just the deaths. I see why.

Caspian before the curse—arrogant and powerful and absolutely terrifying in his certainty that he answers to no one. Not even the gods. I watch him defy the Moon Goddess’s laws, taking what he wants without consequence, killing anyone who dares oppose him, building an empire on blood and fear and the broken bodies of those too weak to stop him. The Goddess sends Serapha to be his mate, to teach him humility and compassion, to soften the edges of his brutality with love.

But he’s too far gone, too drunk on power to be saved.

So Serapha becomes his executioner instead.

The memories shift violently, and I’m suddenly seeing Declan’s father—a brutal Alpha who rules through terror, who slaughters entire villages for the crime of questioning his authority. I watch Caspian challenge him, see them fight in a circle of screaming wolves, witness Caspian tear out his throat in single combat. But it isn’t murder. It’s justice. The ancient law of their people, the right of challenge. And Declan, barely more than a boy, watches from the shadows with hatred blooming in his eyes—not because his father was good, but because Caspian took his path to power.

More memories crash into me like waves, each one threatening to pull me under. I see Serapha in different lives, trying different approaches to the same impossible problem. In one lifetime, she actually falls for Caspian, tries desperately to redeem him through love. I feel her heart breaking as she realizes it’s working, that he’s changing, becoming the man the Goddess wanted him to be. But the curse doesn’t care about redemption. It twists her love into something poisonous, forces her hand, makes her drive a dagger into his chest while tears stream down her face.

In another lifetime, she fights against her purpose with everything she has, trying to resist the pull toward violence. But the Goddess is absolute. I feel Serapha’s horror as her body moves without her permission, as her hands close around his throat even while her mind screams no, no, no. The curse is inescapable. Inevitable. Written into the very fabric of her existence.

I try to scream but I have no voice, no body, just consciousness drowning in centuries of grief and guilt and failure.

Then, slowly, I become aware of something else.

Warmth. Pressure. Hands on my face, rough and gentle at the same time. A voice cutting through the chaos, deep and urgent and afraid in a way that doesn’t match the coldness I’ve come to expect.

“Breathe. Come on, Serapha, breathe—”

Not Serapha.

The thought cuts through everything else with surprising clarity. I’m not Serapha. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I’m Farah Collins, and I’m not ready to disappear into someone else’s tragedy.

I fight toward consciousness like I’m swimming up through deep water, my lungs burning with the need for air. The pain is still there, throbbing behind my eyes and radiating down my spine, but it’s duller now. Manageable. I force my eyes open and immediately regret it when the candlelight feels like knives stabbing into my brain.

Caspian’s face swims into focus above me, and I’ve never seen him look like this. His face is twisted with something that looks uncomfortably close to fear, his blue eyes wide and slightly wild. His hands are cradling my face with a gentleness I didn’t know he was capable of, his thumb stroking my cheekbone in a gesture that’s probably unconscious.

“Breathe,” he says again, and his voice is rough, wrecked. “Please.”

“Farah,” I whisper, my throat raw like I’ve been screaming for hours. Maybe I have been. “My name is Farah.”

Something flickers in his eyes—surprise, maybe, or something more complicated. I’ve never corrected him before, never insisted on my own name over hers. His hands tighten slightly on my face, like he’s afraid I might disappear if he lets go.

“I know what she did to you,” I continue, forcing the words out even though each one feels like swallowing glass. “I remember now. All of it. But I’m not her. Not yet.”

The gentleness disappears from his expression so fast it might have never been there at all. His face becomes the cold, cruel mask I’m more familiar with, his eyes hardening into chips of ice. But I saw it—that moment of raw, unguarded vulnerability. That split second where he let me see how afraid he was that I might die.

He cares.

He doesn’t want to, probably hates himself for it, but he cares.

“What did you see?” The question is a demand, his voice carefully neutral in that way that means he’s feeling too much.

I consider lying for about half a second before deciding I’m too tired, too broken to maintain any kind of deception. The memories are still fresh and bleeding in my mind, and I can feel Serapha’s guilt pressing down on my chest like a physical weight.

“Everything,” I say quietly, my eyes searching his face for any reaction. “All seven times. How she—how I—killed you.”

I watch pain flash across his face before he can hide it, watch his jaw clench and his eyes go distant. For a moment, he looks centuries old, worn down by the weight of lifetimes spent being betrayed by the one person he should have been able to trust.

“And?” His voice is so carefully controlled it almost sounds casual. “Do you understand now why I can’t trust you? Why I have to keep you locked up like an animal?”

“I understand why you hate me,” I say, and I’m surprised by how much the admission hurts. “But I also saw why the Goddess sent her in the first place. Sent me.”

I watch him tense, see his hands clench into fists at his sides like he’s physically restraining himself from either strangling me or pulling me closer. I can’t tell which.

“You weren’t always like this, Caspian,” I continue, my voice barely above a whisper. “Cold and cruel and locked behind walls so high nothing can reach you. You became this because of what she did to you, what I did to you. The curse made you into the very thing the Goddess sent her to stop in the first place.”

His hand shoots out and grips my face again, hard enough that I gasp. Not quite painful but close, his fingers pressing into my skin like he’s trying to leave marks.

“Don’t.”

The word is a warning, low and dangerous.

“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me. Don’t pretend you understand anything about what I’ve been through.”

“But I do,” I insist, even though every instinct is screaming at me to back down, to stop pushing him. “I saw you before all of this. I saw—”

“What?” He cuts me off, his voice harsh with something that sounds like desperation. “That I was better? Kinder? That there was some version of me worth saving?” He laughs, and it’s the most bitter sound I’ve ever heard. “I was worse, Serapha. So much worse than I am now. The curse didn’t make me cruel—it made me careful. It taught me that trust is a weapon, that love is a trap, that anyone who gets close enough to touch me will eventually put a knife in my back.”

He stands abruptly, putting distance between us like I’m something toxic he can’t afford to be near. I feel the loss of his warmth immediately, and I hate that I notice, hate that some part of me wants him to come back.

“The witch’s magic is still in your system,” he says, his back to me now, his shoulders rigid with tension. “Every few hours, it’s going to trigger another episode like this, force more memories through the barriers the Goddess built in your mind. Eventually, probably soon, you’ll remember everything. You’ll become her completely. And when you do—”

He doesn’t finish, but he doesn’t need to. I know what he means. When I fully become Serapha, when there’s nothing left of Farah Collins except memories, I’ll try to kill him again. The curse will make sure of it. It’s inevitable as sunrise, as certain as death.

“There has to be a way to break it,” I say, and I can hear the desperation in my own voice. “The curse, the cycle, all of it. There has to be something we can do—”

“We?” He turns to face me, and his eyes are blazing with something dangerous. “There is no ‘we,’ human. You’re my prisoner, my problem to solve or eliminate. And when the time comes, when you inevitably try to put a blade in my back for the eighth time, I’ll be ready. I won’t make the mistake of trusting you again.”

The door opens and Elara rushes in with water and medicine, her face pale with worry. Caspian moves toward the exit like he can’t get away from me fast enough, and I feel panic clawing at my throat. If he leaves now, if he locks himself behind those walls again, I’ll never reach him. We’ll just repeat the cycle, play out the same tragedy for the eighth time, and nothing will ever change.

“In the fifth lifetime,” I call out, my voice stronger than it has any right to be, “I loved you.”

He freezes with his hand on the door, his entire body going rigid.

“Really loved you,” I continue, the words tumbling out in a rush because I need him to hear this, need him to understand. “Not the mission or the purpose the Goddess gave me. You. The man behind the monster, the person you were trying so hard to hide. And it almost broke the curse. We were so close, Caspian. So close to being free.”

The silence stretches between us, heavy and suffocating. I can see the tension in his shoulders, can practically feel him warring with himself about whether to listen or leave.

“But then she made me kill you anyway,” I say, and my voice breaks on the words. “The Goddess forced my hand, took control of my body, made me drive a sword into your heart while I was screaming inside my own head. I felt every moment of it. The horror, the guilt, the grief. She made sure I felt all of it, made sure I knew exactly what I was doing even though I couldn’t stop myself.”

I take a shaky breath, my hands twisting in the sheets, my heart pounding so hard I’m sure he can hear it from across the room.

“I don’t want to do that again,” I whisper. “I don’t want to be the weapon she uses to destroy you. So if there’s any part of you that doesn’t completely hate me, any small piece that might still be capable of something other than vengeance, please help me find another way. Help me break this before it’s too late for both of us.”

For a long moment, he doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. He just stands there with his back to me, one hand still on the door, his head bowed like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

When he finally speaks, his voice is so quiet I almost don’t hear it.

“Hope is more dangerous than hate, Serapha.” He says my old name deliberately, reminding me of what I’m destined to become. “It’s the thing that destroys you in the end. The thing that makes you believe, just for a moment, that things could be different this time. That maybe the story doesn’t have to end the same way.”

He opens the door, and the hallway light spills into the room, casting his shadow long and dark across the floor.

“But the story always ends the same way,” he says. “And hope is just another word for the moment right before you realize you were a fool.”

The door closes behind him with a soft click that sounds like finality, like the ending of something that never really had a chance to begin. I’m left alone with Elara hovering nervously nearby and the weight of seven lifetimes of failure pressing down on my chest until I can barely breathe.

But I felt it.

In that moment before he shut me out again, I felt something shift between us. Some crack in the armor he’s built around himself, some tiny sliver of possibility that maybe, just maybe, this time could be different.

Even if he doesn’t believe it yet.

Even if I’m not sure I believe it myself.