The girls descended the wide staircase slowly, feeling the air in the living room grow progressively heavier. Sergei sat sprawled in his armchair like a master of the universe, exuding a performative power with every practiced gesture. Beside him, Oksana nervously twirled a strand of her pale hair; her movements were jagged, as if she were a ghost unable to find her place under the suffocating scrutiny of the Verins family.
When the sisters stopped within arm's reach, Oksana finally looked up. A polite smile flickered across her face, but it was a mere mask—static and cold.
— "Nice to meet you," she said. Her voice was jarring: monotonous and stripped of any vital vibration or warmth, as if the words had been carved into her memory rather than spoken from her heart.
At that exact moment, a sharp electric current jolted through Ayana. She caught the familiar "scent" of a soul—the same essence that had once been so inextricably close to her.
— "Could it be her...?" she whispered, the words barely a breath.
Sergei's reaction was instantaneous. He whipped his head around, his gaze—fierce, heavy, like an icy spear—piercing through Ayana. It was an unmistakable warning: Don't you dare see more than you are permitted. Ayana instinctively lowered her eyes, her heart hammering against her ribs as she bit her lip to stifle any further revelation.
But Louise was not about to retreat. She merely flashed a sarcastic smile—one that carried the full weight of her contempt for her uncle's theatrical posturing. Squeezing her sister's hand in a silent vow of support, she led Ayana toward the table, pointedly brushing Oksana's shoulder as they passed. The game had begun—a play where every actor knew their lines, yet only the sisters held the true script.
Oksana stood frozen, swallowed by a wave of humiliation that clung to her like a sticky shroud; she fidgeted, her hands lost and trembling. Sergei, noting his companion's unraveling, darkened further. His eyes—stony and ominous, like the twin barrels of a gun—raked over the girls' faces, searching for a fracture, a weakness to exploit. The next fifteen minutes were pure psychological torture: a heavy, suffocating silence hung in the air, punctuated only by sharp, staccato phrases that landed like gunshots.
Ayana felt the very walls of the living room begin to constrict around her. Every instinct screamed of falsehood and imminent danger. Unable to endure the charade a second longer, she bolted upright—the screech of her chair legs against the polished floor sliced through the silence like a blade. Without a word, she fled toward the exit, her frantic, uneven footsteps sounding like a desperate escape from a cage.
— "Don't worry, Omelya, I'll handle her myself!" Sergei barked with a veneer of undisguised malice, hauling himself up from his chair. There was something predatory in his tone, as if he had finally been granted permission to hunt.
— "I'll go to her!" Louise countered, her voice trembling with raw concern for her sister, yet ringing with a fierce determination to protect her.
However, her father blocked her path. Virmond, who until that moment had stood like a frozen statue, finally intervened. His voice rang out with the finality of an iron hammer, leaving no room for dissent.
— "Louise, stay here. Get to know Oksana. Your uncle will speak with Ayana as family."
Virmond's command fell like the blade of a guillotine. Sergei nodded with a smug, predatory satisfaction and stepped into the deepening shadows of the garden. Louise froze, watching helplessly as her uncle retreated. His heavy footsteps shattered the nocturnal silence, each strike sounding like a nail being driven into the coffin of the garden's peace. Sergei approached slowly, deliberately dragging out the moment, savoring the fear he assumed the girl must be feeling.
Ayana stood by the ancient fountain, inhaling the cool air thick with the scent of damp earth. She searched the stars—the same distant beacons that had watched over her thousands of years ago—seeking even a drop of the tranquility that reigned in the vastness of the interdimensional void.
— "Don't you dare behave like that in front of my beloved!" he barked. Sergei's voice was jagged and raw, whistling through the air like the crack of a whip, leaving a phantom trail of blood in its wake.
Ayana shuddered and spun around abruptly. Her hazel eyes widened at the suffocating proximity of her enemy, her heart hammering in her throat. She froze—a small animal caught in the blinding glare of headlights. A violent battle raged within her: one fragment of her soul pleaded for silence to avoid provoking the man's destructive rage; the other, which carried the weight of every past mistake, demanded action. If she had been granted the gift of seeing through the veil of time, did she have the right to remain silent while an abyss opened beneath another's feet?
— "Uncle..." she whispered, and that whisper seemed to thunder louder than his shout. "I didn't mean to offend her. But you must know... The day will come when she will deceive you. When her radiant smile will prove to be nothing but a reflection of your own greed. But—"
She never finished the sentence. Two sharp, bone-dry blows shattered the nocturnal silence, striking her face with inhuman force. Pain flared like a white-hot flame; her lower lip split instantly, and warm, salty blood flowed thickly down her chin, staining her skin with jagged crimson marks.
Sergei's rage was primal, animalistic. He lunged, grabbing Ayana by the hair and dragging her toward the car like a sack of refuse. The metallic thud of the central lock echoed like a final sentence. Ayana was trapped. She frantically reached for her phone, her fingers trembling as she tried to dial her parents, but Sergei wrenched the device from her hands with a single, violent motion. Her last shred of hope flickered and died along with the darkening screen.
The engine roared to life, and the car lunged into the night, its headlights slicing through the impenetrable darkness of the streets. Sergei dialed Omelya. His voice was now perfectly calibrated—cool, composed, professional.
— "Omelya, there's been an episode—an escalation with Ayana. She realized she couldn't cope and has voluntarily agreed to go to Seli Sei. Don't worry, I have everything under control."
— "I... I see," her mother's voice trembled, but she clung to this lie as if it were a lifeline. "Be careful. And have her call me as soon as she's settled."
— "Of course," Sergei snapped and cut the connection.
Ayana sat in the passenger seat, frozen like a marble statue. The blood dried in dark crusts on her face; her eyes burned from the relentless tears that tracked down her cheeks, but she no longer fought. The realization of her absolute isolation washed over her like a frigid tide: in this world of sterile success and rigid rationality, no one would believe her truth. No one was coming. She felt like a small bird trapped in an iron cage, and the only thing remaining was to shield the image within—the one Sergei could never touch. The silence and the pain were now the only things keeping her soul from shattering completely.
The car tore through the night, its tires screeching fiercely as they bit into the asphalt, shattering the suburban silence. The headlights pierced the dark with narrow, agonizing strips of light, dragging only gray pillars and hollow intersections out of the abyss. Inside the cabin, the atmosphere was suffocating: Sergei's heavy, ragged breathing coalesced with Ayana's stifled, barely audible sobs. She pressed herself against the cold glass of the door, trying to shrink smaller than her own shadow, desperate to dissolve into the midnight air and simply vanish.
The road relentlessly pulled them away from the comforting glow of downtown Beilin. The buildings grew shorter, the trees more gnarled and gloomy, until the city itself fell away. Finally, a massive three-story structure loomed out of the fog. The psychiatric ward towered over the earth like a majestic, desolate fortress.
Sergei braked so violently that Ayana lurched forward. He didn't spare her a glance. To him, she was no longer his niece; she was a "pathology" successfully delivered to its destination. Ayana looked up at the grim facade and felt the icy wind of eternity trace a path down her spine. This was the inception of her greatest conflict—the battle for the right to remain herself in a place where one's soul was diagnosed as a disease.
The plaster on the building's walls had long since surrendered, peeling away to expose gray patches that resembled deep, unhealed scars on the carcass of a giant. The surrounding streetlights flickered with a dim, dying uncertainty; their rhythmic pulsing felt like the final agony of old lamps before they succumb to the void. Many had already lost the battle, leaving vast stretches of the grounds plunged into an impenetrable, suffocating darkness.
Beyond the rusted fence, which groaned under the biting gusts of wind, stretched an alley of gnarled trees. Their branches, twisted into bizarre convulsions, stood like frozen sentinels—half-hunched shadows of men, half-hideous monsters jealously guarding the threshold. Their shadows danced a frantic, jagged rhythm across the cracked asphalt, as if Nature itself were screaming a warning, pleading with Ayana not to take that final, irreversible step.
The windows, though replaced with modern plastic, already bore the indelible marks of suffering: deep gouges, cracks, and the frantic traces of desperate blows. Each was crowned with bars—cold, merciless iron interlacing that stood as the ultimate symbol of total confinement. In this place, the only path to the exit was through absolute submission.
Sergei and Ayana stood before a massive stone staircase. The steps were hollowed out, worn down by the thousands of weary feet that had ascended them before her. Above them towered a darkened, splintered wooden door—the gate to an underground kingdom. Sergei turned to her slowly. His gaze was now pure ice, poisoned with a hatred and contempt he no longer felt the need to mask.
He leaned in so close that Ayana could feel the heat of his heavy, oppressive breath. His voice dropped to a low, venomous hiss:
— "You think you know more than I do? You think your pathetic warnings carry weight? You are nothing, Ayana. You don't belong among the living. Your place is here—caged with the rest of the broken."
Ayana felt her heart seize in the grip of a primal, paralyzing terror. Her hands trembled; her gaze was fixed on the massive doors, which loomed like a portal to a dimension where "freedom" was a word long since stricken from the language. The tension in the air thickened until every breath became a labor, as if her lungs were being filled with molten lead.
Sergei's fingers dug into her forearm, his grip so violent that a dull, throbbing pain radiated through her bones. He dragged her forward. Their footsteps echoed off the peeling walls of the long, sepulchral corridors, where the flickering lamps only served to illuminate the surrounding hopelessness. Every set of bars they passed seemed to whisper a rhythmic chant: "There is no turning back."
They halted before the director's office. Sergei wrenched the door open and all but shoved the girl into an old wooden chair that shrieked under her weight. Without wasting a heartbeat, he loomed over the desk where a figure in a sterile white coat sat waiting. His voice, jagged and fueled by a bitter, unchecked rage, filled the room:
— "I am here on behalf of Omelya Verins! This is her daughter. She is ill—delirious. She won't stop this nonsense about 'past lives'! Do something with her!"
Ayana straightened her spine. Despite her split lip and trembling hands, she raised her hazel eyes, burning with a newfound defiance, toward the director. The battle for her mind had officially begun.
Seli Sei slowly looked up from the medical chart. She was the embodiment of austere elegance: a tall, young woman with a slender face, her aristocratic pallor accentuated by the stark whiteness of her gown. Her delicate nose and thin lips, pressed into a line of professional restraint, gave her the ethereal appearance of an ancient statue suddenly granted life. Yet, the true power of her presence lay in her eyes—large, luminous, and dark blue, like the night sea before a storm. In that deep, weary gaze, one could read a flicker of sincere surprise tempered by a growing, restrained anxiety.
She replied in a voice that was quiet yet resonant with authority, causing Sergei to fall abruptly silent as the air in the office seemed to drop several degrees:
— "But, Mr. Sergei, every test result indicates the contrary... The girl is perfectly healthy. Her cognitive functions are normal; there are no clinical markers of a disorder."
Sergei exploded. His face flushed a violent crimson, the veins in his neck bulging like taut cords. He slammed his fist onto the heavy oak desk, sending papers flying across the office like a flock of frightened birds.
— "I don't give a damn about your papers!" he roared, spitting with unbridled rage. "I will pay you over a billion to keep her here! This girl stays the night, and tomorrow morning, you will have the commitment papers for her hospitalization on my desk. That is an order!"
His words landed with the finality of a death warrant. The air in the office grew so dense it felt as though it could be sliced with a blade. Sergei spun around with a violent flourish and stormed out, slamming the door with such tectonic force that the very foundations of the building seemed to shudder. He didn't spare Ayana a final glance—to him, she was already a sold commodity, a transaction closed.
Ayana remained anchored to the old chair. Her split lip throbbed with a dull, rhythmic heat; the blood had hardened into a dark crust, and a faint tremor still danced through her fingers. The world felt as though it had constricted to the four walls of this office. Yet, instead of the expected hysteria, a profound, icy calm crystallized within her soul. For a long moment, she sat in silence, calculating her next steps with a chilling precision, before raising her hazel eyes to meet the Director's. Her voice was uncharacteristically firm, devoid of any childish fragility:
— "Mrs. Sei... you must agree. Take the money."
The woman exhaled a heavy, ragged sigh and slowly shook her head, her dark blue eyes swimming with boundless pity.
— "My girl," she whispered, "life in this place is no game. These are walls designed to break even the most resilient spirits. Do not invite a fate upon yourself that you simply cannot endure."
Ayana leaned forward, dismissing the physical agony that flared through her body. Her words began to flow in a steady, rhythmic stream, saturated with a bitter, ancient wisdom:
— "You know I'm right. You need this capital to sustain this hospital, to provide real aid to those who are truly suffering. I promise to be your most compliant patient. I will even assist you in the wards. Face the harsh truth: if you refuse, my uncle will simply relocate me. He'll find another asylum where the doctors won't possess your grace. Then this wealth will be squandered, and I will still be behind bars. Let me stay here... with you."
Ayana's voice resonated with a desperate, almost sacred prayer. She was pleading not only for her own sanctuary but for the ghostly inhabitants of these corridors who had long since abandoned the hope of salvation. Seli Sei froze, her dark blue eyes searching the girl's hazel depths, as if trying to discern the true boundaries of the ancient wisdom that had prompted such a calculated deal.
Finally, the Director offered a slow, heavy nod of understanding.
— "You are right, girl. Your uncle won't stop, and these funds... they could indeed alter the fate of many within these walls. Very well. I will accept the money. You will have your own room."
She paused, her voice regaining the metallic edge of professional authority.
— "I emphasize: a room, not a ward. For your family and Sergei's reports, everything will appear flawless. You will ostensibly be administered experimental drugs and undergo intensive treatment. But your actual medical record will remain pristine. No chemicals. No manipulation of your consciousness. Is that agreed?"
Ayana had not expected such mercy in a place that resembled purgatory. Her eyes brimmed with tears once more, sparkling like diamonds in the uneven flicker of the desk lamp. Her battered lips curved into a trembling arc—a fragile mosaic of profound relief and physical agony. She simply offered a quiet, solemn nod of agreement, her voice lost to the weight of the moment.
Seli Sei rose, her white gown fluttering like a shroud in the office's semi-darkness. She gestured for Ayana to follow. They traversed an endless corridor where the walls, scarred with layers of ancient plaster, greedily echoed their every footfall. Ahead, the massive doors to the "VIP wing" groaned open. This place was destined to become Ayana's new cage—yet, simultaneously, it was the only sanctuary left from Sergei's predatory rage and her own mother's blind, hollow faith.
.