Just as she hit the final key to compile the program, her burner phone lit up on the table. It was a text from an unknown number.
Ayla opened it.
How does it feel to be a stray dog, Ayla? Come to the Manor gates tonight at 8:00 PM to collect your mother’s ashes. If you are late, I will throw them in the East River.
Ayla stared at the screen. The air left her lungs entirely.
Her mother’s ashes. The wooden urn she had kept hidden in the back of her closet. The only piece of her true family she had left in the world.
Axel had found her absolute center. He had located her fatal weakness.
Ayla’s fingers gripped the edge of the table so hard her nails dug into the cheap wood. Her eyes turned completely black.
Freezing rain lashed against the heavy wrought-iron gates of Farrell Manor on the Upper East Side.
It was exactly eight o’clock.
Ayla stood on the wet pavement outside the gates, holding a cheap transparent plastic umbrella she had bought from a bodega with her last few dollars. The wind whipped her wet hair across her face, but she didn’t shiver. She stared through the iron bars at the massive, glowing mansion.
This was the gilded cage she had lived in for three years. Tonight, it looked like a tomb.
She didn’t press the intercom button. She simply stood there, a silent ghost in the storm.
A minute later, the small side door beside the main gate clicked open.
It wasn’t Martha, the housekeeper.
Kristal stepped out into the rain, holding a large black plastic garbage bag. Ayla’s eyes immediately dropped to what she was wearing – a burgundy silk robe, the exact limited-edition haute couture piece Ayla had left hanging in the master bedroom closet. It was too long for Kristal, dragging slightly on the wet ground, but she wore it like a trophy.
Kristal walked up to the iron gate but didn’t open it. She stood on the inside, sheltered by the overhang, looking down at Ayla with a sickeningly sweet smile.
“You look terrible, Ayla,” Kristal cooed, her voice dripping with venomous pity. “The streets really don’t suit you.”
Ayla didn’t blink. Her gaze dropped to the black garbage bag in Kristal’s hand.
“Give me the urn,” Ayla said, her voice completely flat, devoid of any emotion.
Kristal laughed – a sharp, grating sound. She lifted the garbage bag and shook it slightly. The contents rattled inside.
“Axel told me to clean out the closet,” Kristal said, tracing a manicured finger along an iron bar. “He said having your trash in the house was ruining the aesthetic of our bedroom. I moved in last night, by the way. Axel didn’t want to sleep alone.”
Kristal waited for a reaction. She wanted to see Ayla cry. She wanted jealousy, heartbreak, anything.
Ayla’s knuckles turned white around the umbrella handle. Her stomach churned with physical disgust, but her face remained a mask of ice.
“If you are done giving me the details of your pathetic whoring,” Ayla said, her voice dropping to a lethal whisper, “hand over the bag.”
Kristal’s smug smile vanished. Her eyes flashed with sudden, vicious anger. Ayla’s absolute indifference felt like a slap across the face.
“You think you are still better than me?” Kristal hissed, her true nature bleeding through the elegant facade. “You are a homeless beggar!”
Kristal grabbed the bottom of the garbage bag and violently ripped it open. She shoved the contents through the gaps in the iron gate.
A yellowed diary, a stack of old faded photographs, and a small purple sandalwood box tumbled out and hit the wet pavement with a sickening thud. The sandalwood box bounced on the concrete. The impact cracked the corner of the wood.
Kristal let out a cruel, triumphant laugh. “Don’t ever come back to the Upper East Side, you piece of trash.”
She turned and walked back toward the mansion, the burgundy silk trailing through the mud behind her.
Ayla’s mind went completely blank.
The umbrella slipped from her hand and blew away in the wind.
She dropped to her knees in the freezing mud. She didn’t care about the rain soaking through her clothes. She frantically gathered the wet photographs and the diary, her trembling hands finally closing around the cracked sandalwood box. She pulled it to her chest and curled her body over it, shielding it from the rain.
Kneeling in the mud outside the gate, the rain mixing with the hot tears streaming down her face, she felt the crack in the wood as though it were a fracture in her own chest.
She slowly stood. She held the box tightly against her, and without a single glance back at the mansion, she turned and walked into the dark, rainy night. The last thread connecting her to her past had been severed. Her eyes were hollow, radiating a terrifying, dead silence.
An hour later, Ayla pushed open the heavy wooden door of a dive bar on the far edge of Brooklyn.
The air inside was thick with stale beer, cheap cigarettes, and sweat. A scratchy heavy metal song blasted from a neon jukebox in the corner. Five massive men in leather cuts covered in biker patches crowded around a pool table, shouting and slamming their cues.
Ayla walked straight to the darkest corner of the bar and sat on a ripped vinyl stool. She placed the sandalwood box carefully on the inside of the counter, shielding it with her body.
The bartender, a heavily tattooed man, walked over and took one look at her ruined clothes and her pale face.
“What do you want?” he grunted.
“A bottle of your cheapest tequila,” Ayla said, her voice raspy. She placed her last crumpled twenty-dollar bill on the sticky counter.
He grabbed the bill and slammed a half-full bottle of generic tequila on the bar. No glass.
Ayla didn’t ask for one. She grabbed the neck of the bottle, brought it to her lips, and took a massive, burning swallow. The cheap alcohol scorched her throat and hit her empty stomach like battery acid. She coughed, her eyes watering, and immediately took another drink.
She needed the fire. She needed the alcohol to burn away the crushing weight of the last three years – the humiliation of the blacklist, the freezing rain, the sight of her mother’s urn hitting the mud.
She took a third drink. The alcohol hit her bloodstream fast.
Her psychological defenses – the iron walls she had built to survive Axel’s abuse – finally shattered.
Ayla slumped forward over the bar. She buried her face in her arms, right beside the wooden box. Her shoulders began to shake violently. She didn’t make a sound, but the tears poured out of her, hot and unstoppable. It was a breakdown of pure, absolute self-destruction.
The heavy metal music couldn’t mask the raw, broken energy radiating from her corner.
At the pool table, the largest biker – a man with a thick beard and a spiderweb tattoo on his neck – stopped chalking his cue. His predatory eyes locked onto Ayla’s shaking shoulders. He nudged his friend. They exchanged a dark look.
The bearded man set his cue down and walked over, his heavy boots thudding against the wooden floor. He smelled of cheap beer and unwashed clothes. He reached out a massive, dirty hand and roughly grabbed Ayla’s shoulder.
“Hey, sweetheart,” the biker slurred, his grip tightening painfully on her collarbone. “Why are you drinking alone? Let me buy you a real drink.”
Ayla’s head snapped up.
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