|Serena's POV|
The car's interior feels like a tomb, wrapped in the thick, suffocating silence that settles in after the chaos. The kind that follows me, no matter how far I run. I can still hear the paps outside, their words clawing at the tinted windows like flies buzzing around a corpse. It's as though I'm trapped in a loop I can't escape, a reality where I'm the headline, the subject, the spectacle.
But not the person.
I turn my wrist, the gold band gleaming in the dim light. My eyes linger on the faint red mark beneath the watch. The blood is already drying, leaving behind the phantom of a wound—proof that I'm still tethered to something real.
Something untouched by their cameras, their questions, their judgments.
The voice of my mother rises in my mind, just a whisper now, the o
