ALESSIA POV
The sun didn't fully rise in London during the winter—it just bruises the sky in a dull, aching gray. Waking up has always been something I dread every day; it has always been a constant reminder that nothing changes overnight. That I'm still... me. I stood by my floor-to-ceiling window, my head resting casually against the cold glass. From this height in Kensington, the world looked orderly and quiet, a stark contrast to the noise I knew was waiting for me downstairs. I reached for my coffee—black, no sugar—just the way I've taught myself to like it.
In that few minutes of solitude, I wasn't a daughter, a student, a sister, or a disappointment. I was just me. I turned to the mirror, and the familiar wave of dissatisfaction hit right on schedule. My silk slip dress slipped off my shoulders, exposing sharp collarbone and the narrowness of my frame that my mother always looked at with a sigh.
The magazines call this "waifish" and "ethereal." They sell expensive creams and drugs to make women look pale and translucent as I am. But they don't tell you the truth: that being this fragile feels less like art and more like an apology for taking up space.
I looked at the face people call pretty... then down to the body they whispered about. "She has a pretty face, too bad she is..." Too thin, too fragile, not enough. I heard that almost every day. They start with the face, as if my features are a consolation price for the rest of me. It's their way of being polite while they pull me apart. They see a face they like, and a body they want to fix, but they never bother to look for the person living inside both.
Like I was unfinished.
Like something has gone wrong somewhere. I was pulled out of my thought by the voice of my mother calling from the dining room.
"Alessia."
She never raised her voice. She didn't need to.
My mother believed in control, in appearance, in silence, in the kind of perfection that left no room for anything... unfinished. She is an embodiment of elegance: composed and always just out of reach—at least for me. From a young age, I never experienced motherly love. I was always the distant child of the family, the disappointment who never did anything right. I spent my life competing for her attention, but she never truly looked at me.
I blinked, forcing the image of my mother to dissolve back to the mirror. I turned toward my walk-in closet, moving with a mechanical precision that feels like safety. I bypassed the delicate, form-fitting pieces my sister always tried to force on me—the ones meant to "create curves where there were none." Instead, I reached for a heavy, oversized charcoal turtleneck. I pulled it over my head, feeling the thick wool graze my chin, effectively burying the "fragile" girl my mother always looked at with a sigh of disapproval.
By the time I clinched my trench coat and grabbed my leather satchel, the "birdie" the world expected was fully assembled. I looked in the mirror one last time. The girl staring back is pretty, yes, but she was also a fortress.
I checked my phone—no messages, no reason to stay. My laptop was tucked safely in my bag, containing the only part of my life that felt like mine.
With a deep breath to steady my pulse, I opened my bedroom door and stepped out. The silence of the upstairs hallway was thick, heavy with the scent of expensive lilies and floor wax. I stood at the top of the stairs, my finger grazing the cold marble banister. For a split second, the texture of the stone felt like silk—the phantom sensation of fabric slipping through my grip years ago. I can still feel the coldness in her eyes, the desperate, crushing weight of a "please" that was never answered.
I had just learned the hard way that in this house, tears were just a leak in the foundation. Being broken didn't earn you love here; it only earned you a closed door and deeper silence. I pushed the memory back into the dark. I couldn't be that desperate girl today.
The quiet was suddenly replaced by the distant, rhythmic clicking of utensils against fine bone china and more precisely the rare sound of laughter. My mother's voice carried up the stairs—warm, light, and full of a genuine happiness that only seems to exist when she is talking to my siblings.
I froze for a heartbeat, my hand tightening on the marble banister. I didn't want to go down. I didn't want to be the shadow that walked into their light and ruin their happy moment. In this house, my presence was the "unfinished" note in the otherwise perfect song.
But I couldn't hide forever. I forced my legs to move, each step feeling like an intrusion.
As I entered the dining room, the warmth in my mother's expression didn't stand a chance. The second her eyes drifted to me, the light in them cooled as if a bucket of cold water was poured over her head, shifting back into the familiar, clinical assessment. The happy moment was replaced by the heavy air of expectation. "Mother," I said softly, my voice barely carrying over the click of her cutlery. I lowered my head, staring at the polished mahogany of the table, waiting.
For a heartbeat—then another—the only sound was the rustle of my mother's tablet and the soft chewing of my sister's breakfast. I stayed like that, suspended in the heavy silence, wondering if today was another day where I would be left standing there until I faded into wallpaper. I waited for her to grace me with a response, for a sign that I was even a person in the room.
Finally, without looking up, she gave me a sharp, clinical nod. "Why are you late?" my mother asked, her voice cutting through the air like a blade. She didn't even look up from her tablet, but her presence in the room spiked. "Did you expect us to wait for you until you decided to grace us with your presence?" I felt the heat climb into my cheeks. I hadn't expected them to wait—I had hoped they wouldn't notice me at all. My heart hammered against my ribs as I stood there, the target of her cold gaze.
Why am I the only one she does this to? I wondered, my eye flickering to the empty chair beside me. Leo wasn't even here yet. He was later than I was, but the air isn't thick with tension for him. There was no sharp questioning for him, no demand for an apology, no heavy tension waiting to crush him as soon as he walked through the door.
For him, the room remained warm but for me, it had turned into ice.
"I... I'm sorry, Mother," I managed to say. My voice was small, but I kept my eyes level. "I didn't mean to keep you."
As I looked at her cold face, a thought I've had a thousand times crept back to my mind: Maybe she really isn't my mother. Maybe she didn't actually give birth to me. It was easier to believe a lie like that than to accept that a mother could hate her child. But every time I looked in the mirror, the truth slapped me deep in the face. I am a replica of her.
We share the same piercing blue eye—a color so cold it looks frozen over a lake. I have her prominent, high cheekbones that looked like they were carved from marble, and the same sharp aristocratic jawline that never softens. Even our hair, a deep raven black, falls the exact same way but the resemblance stops there. My mother carries herself with heavy, confident grace; she has curves that demand attention and sitting right beside her like a polished younger version, was my older sister, Seraphina. She had inherited every ounce of that grace, looking like a queen-in-waiting as she sipped her tea. They were a united front of perfection, and I was the only smudge on their portrait.
Seraphina finally looked up, her expression shifting into that practiced, fake-sweet mask she always wore when she wanted to look "helpful."
"Oh, Alessia. Don't just stand there trembling," she sighed, her voice dripping with that fake sweetness. "You know mother values punctuality. Just apologize properly. Maybe if you beg her for forgiveness, she'll forget how disrespectful you are by making us wait."
She reached out, patting my hand. Her touch was a warning.
I pulled my hand back as if Seraphina's skin had burned me. My sister's smile didn't falter, but her eyes glinted with the satisfaction of a cat playing with a wounded bird.
"Enough," Mother said, the word clicking like a lock. "Sit down, Alessia. Try not to make any more noise than necessary."
I sank into my chair, feeling the heavy wool of my sweater swallow me whole. I was waiting for the lecture to continue, waiting for the ice to thicken when the heavy oak doors of the dining hall groaned as they mechanically swung open. I didn't have to look up to know who it was. There was only one person in this house allowed to be this late without a lecture.
Leo. My eldest brother.
As the firstborn and the sole heir to our father's empire, Leo was the sun around which this entire cold house revolved. While Seraphina was the "perfect" daughter and I was the "fragile" mistake, Leo was the masterpiece.
He walked in with a lazy, confident stride, his expensive suit jacket unbuttoned as if the rigid rules of the house didn't apply to him. He had the same piercing blue eyes as the rest of us, but where theirs were frozen lakes, his were like the sky on a summer day—bright and full of a life they hadn't managed to crush out of him yet.
He didn't bow to Mother. He didn't acknowledge Seraphina's "helpful" advice to me. Instead, he walked straight to my side, the heels of his boots clicking sharply against the marble floor.
A wide, genuine smile broke across his face. He reached out, bumping his shoulder against mine—a small, silent gesture of protection.
"Good morning, everyone," he said, his voice smooth and completely ignoring the heavy tension. He looked at me, his eyes softening. "You look beautiful today, Alessia. That piece—it really suits you.
I felt the heat crawl up my neck, a rare spark of warmth in a room that usually felt like a tomb. Leo was the only one who could look at a fortress of charcoal wool and see a girl worth complimenting.
But the silence that followed his words wasn't kind. It was heavy.
"Beautiful?" Seraphina's voice was a soft, melodic poison. She set her teacup down with a delicate clink that sounded like a gavel. "Leo, darling, your heart is always so much bigger than your eyes. It's a turtleneck, not a gala gown. But I suppose for Alessia, hiding is the best fashion choice she's made all year."
Mother didn't laugh, but the slight quirk of her lips was worse. "Keep your opinions to yourself Seraphina. I don't need you poking your nose everywhere" He said while adjusting his sleeves. Mother finally looked up from her tablet, her gaze skipping over me as if I were a piece of furniture that had been moved out of place.
"Appearance is a reflection of discipline," Mother said coldly. "Leo, sit down. Your sister's 'beauty' is not the topic of the morning. We have guests arriving this afternoon, and I expect everyone to be... presentable. Without the hiding, Alessia."
The word hiding felt like a slap. I clutched my leather satchel tighter under the table. They didn't just want me to be perfect; they wanted to see the parts of me they hated so they could critique them.
"She's fine as she is," Leo muttered, his hand giving my shoulder one last squeeze before he finally took his seat at the head of the table.
For the rest of the meal, the only sound was the rhythmic clicking of silver against china. I didn't eat. I couldn't. I just watched the way the winter light caught the sharp edges of my mother's jaw, wondering how many more layers I would have to put on before I was finally invisible enough to be safe.
I checked my phone. It was time to leave for the university.
"I'll be going now," I whispered, not expecting a reply.
"Be back by four," Mother said, not looking up. "And lose the sweater, Alessia. It makes the family look... untidy."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. I just turned and walked out of the room, my boots echoing against the marble, feeling the weight of Seraphina's smirk following me all the way to the door. "We meet at the campus, little sis" I didn't look back. I jammed the heavy door of the dining room behind me, the loud thud finally drowning out Seraphina's mocking voice and the clinical silence of my mother.
The air in the hallway was still cold, but it felt cleaner. I made my way to the parking lot, the cold London air biting at the small patches of skin my sweater didn't cover. I climbed into my car, the interior smelling of old paper and the expensive leather my father insisted on.
As I turned the key, my mother's voice echoed in my head. Guests. >
In our house, "guests" were never just visitors. They were tectonic plates shifting. They meant deals were being signed or lives were being rearranged. I didn't know who was coming, but the way my mother's hand had trembled slightly over her tablet told me everything I needed to know.
Someone powerful was coming to Kensington.
I shifted the car into gear, my eyes fixed on the gate. I had six hours of university lectures to get through before I had to face whatever storm was brewing back at the house. Six hours to pretend I was just a normal student, and not a shadow waiting to be erased.