A VOW FOR VENGEANCE

Chapter Nine: Patterns

Hanna's POV

I did not turn around right away. I let Mia's question sit in the dark hallway a moment longer.

"You ask a lot of questions for someone who was just caught sneaking a boy out a side door," I said finally, keeping my eyes on the stairs ahead.

"That is not an answer."

"It does not need to be." I looked back at her over my shoulder. "Goodnight, Mia."

I climbed the stairs slowly, listening for her footsteps behind me the whole way, and only let my posture break once my bedroom door was shut and locked.

The shower ran hot enough to sting, and I stood under it longer than I needed to, letting the night wash off in pieces. I poured a glass of wine once I was dressed and sat on the edge of my bed, and that was when my phone made a noise on the nightstand.

Lucas: Goodnight, Hanna. I kept thinking about you and I meant everything I said today. Love you.

I read it once and set the phone face down without replying.

It was clear at this point that Lucas was not interested in my answer anymore and was hellbent on pursuing me.

I did not need to answer it tonight. Maybe I would never need to answer it at all.

I left the mansion past midnight and drove to the one place in the city that was fully mine, the penthouse my father had put in my name years ago. Nobody besides me and Victoria knew the address.

The elevator doors opened right into the living room. The walls were made of glass. Outside, the whole city of New York looked like a big black blanket covered in a thousand tiny lights. I stood there with a glass of wine and watched the tiny cars move far below.

When I first got this place, I used to hate being alone. I used to call Lucas the minute I walked in because the silence scared me.

Tonight, it felt good. I looked at my face in the dark glass for a while. I was changing a lot since I woke up in the hospital and I seemed to enjoy every bit of it.

I walked over to the small wooden desk by the living room and pulled out the leather jotter my father had bought me on his last trip before he collapsed.

I opened to a blank page and started writing.

The date of the accident came first. I wrote it out in full, 12 February 2025, the exact day everything ended the first time around, and circled it twice, hard enough that the pen nearly tore through the paper. Then I kept going, faster and faster. The memories in my head were beginning to pour out.

I took time to write out every time I had seen Mia and Lucas had been together, either standing too close at a party, always with some easy excuse ready before I could even ask or the dinner where Mia had laughed a little too late at one of his jokes, like she needed a second to catch up on something she should already have understood.

I was not going to be fooled again.

I filled two full pages before my hand started to ache, names and dates and small strange details stacking on top of each other, forming a shape I had never let myself see clearly before. I sat back for a moment, massaging my fingers, and let my eyes scan through everything I had written.

Suddenly, a memory I had not touched in over a year, buried so deep I had almost convinced myself it belonged to someone else's life.

It happened the night before my dad got sick, Isla had asked me to sign something. A stack of papers I never read properly, rushed through in the middle of a family crisis, her voice was urgent, telling me it was only standard paperwork to keep the company running smoothly while he recovered.

I remembered the date on those papers now, clear as anything, because it lined up with something I had completely missed the first time I lived through this year. Isla had not been reacting to my father's collapse that night. She had already had the papers prepared, sitting ready in a folder, waiting for the right moment to slide them in front of me.

She might have known he was going to collapse before it happened.

I sat frozen at the desk, wine forgotten beside me, staring at the page like it might rearrange itself into something less terrifying if I looked hard enough. If I was right about the timing, and if the date I had just written down truly lined up the way I thought it did, then everything I believed about my father's illness was wrong.

And if it was wrong, I did not have nearly as much time left as I thought I did.