Chapter 155
Lara had been lying awake for over an hour, but sleep refused to claim her.
The room was quiet—too quiet. Even the soft breathing of the little girl beside her only sharpened the tension coiled in her chest.
She pushed herself upright and sat at the edge of the bed, her gaze drifting toward the child.
Shay slept peacefully, her tiny face relaxed, lashes resting like delicate shadows against her cheeks.
An angel.
Untouched by the kind of truths Lara was beginning to uncover.
Lara’s brows drew together.
Her mind reached—again—for something that should have been there.
But there was nothing, just fog. A suffocating, impenetrable fog.
And beneath it, a dull, throbbing pressure that pulsed behind her eyes like a warning.
She exhaled slowly and reached for the photo book.
The balcony doors slid open with a soft whisper, letting in the cool night air. It brushed against her skin, grounding, but not enough.
She sank into the lounge chair and opened the photo book again.
Grade Five.
Her fingers froze against the page—as if the paper itself had turned cold.
The photograph stared back at her.
A pre-adolescent girl. Light brown hair falling neatly over her shoulders. Brown eyes, soft and unguarded. A shy smile that didn’t quite reach confidence—but carried a quiet warmth.
Innocent. Unaware. Unbroken.
Lara’s gaze sharpened.
She had seen the photo before.
Back when she first woke up from that long, suffocating darkness of a coma… when the name Larissa Reyes had been handed to her like a label stitched onto borrowed skin.
So this was it.
Grade Five.
The year she stepped into another girl’s life and took over her identity.
The real Larissa Reyes had disappeared a few years back—taken, swallowed whole by human traffickers, never to return.
She was presumed dead.
And Lara p>
Lara had been placed into the empty space she left behind.
A replacement…a carefully crafted lie.
Her gaze lingered on the smiling girl in the photograph.
They looked alike—enough to deceive at a glance. Fifty percent, maybe more if you didn’t look too closely.
But the eyes p>
Lara slowly lifted her hand, fingertips brushing just beneath her own gaze as if she could feel the difference embedded in her bones.
Hers was hazel and most of the time brown. A subtle difference—but not a small one.
So why hadn’t anyone noticed? Why hadn’t her parents noticed?
Or—
A chilling thought slid into place.
Had they known all along?
What if they had looked into her eyes and seen the difference… and chose silence anyway?
Because just like her, they were pawns in someone’s else game.
Lara’s jaw tightened.
She tried to recall their faces.
Tried to force them into clarity.
But the harder she pushed, the more they slipped away—like ink dissolving in water.
Their faces were blurred and distorted, just like the man at the entrance of that cave.
A sharp pain lanced through her head.
She inhaled sharply, pressing her fingers to her temple.
No.
Her mind wasn’t just forgetting. It was refusing
Locking something away.
Protecting her—or imprisoning her.
She tried to look for Larissa’s parents’ photos online. But, they weren’t people who lived in the public eye. They have no digital traces. No casual photographs scattered across the internet.
Only one set of images existed.
The one from the accident. And even those were useless.
The blood-soaked faces were obscured and unrecognizable.
Lara’s gaze dropped back to the album on her lap.
Every photo from Grade Five onward p>
She had already seen them all before.
Not as memories but from the school forum and from the internet.
A bitter realization curled in her chest.
“So why give this to me… Yannis Fenn p>
Her voice was soft, but it cut through the silence.
This wasn’t helping her remember.
No—
It was doing something far more dangerous.
It was confirming pieces while leaving the most important parts buried.
The man she called Dad p>
There was still nothing. No face. No features.
Just a hollow void—like someone had carved him out of her memory and left the edges raw.
And yet p>
Not everything was gone.
His voice p>
Low and controlled. The kind that never needed to rise to command obedience.
His presence p>
Heavy and suffocating. The air itself seemed to tighten whenever he was near.
That—
That she remembered too well.
A chill crawled down her spine, sharp and instinctive. Her fingers curled slightly against the armrest as a shudder slipped through her before she could stop it.
Not from the thought but from instinct.
From something buried deeper than memory.
Why?
What was so terrifying that even now her mind refused to give him a face?
Lara leaned back against the chair, her head tipping toward the ceiling, her gaze unfocused as shadows stretched above her.
Her heartbeat pounded in her ears.
It was too loud and too fast.
Like a warning she couldn’t translate.
Like her body already knew the truth—
while her mind was still too afraid to catch up.
Then she thought of Yannis Fenn. She was certain of it now. He knew far more than he had said. Perhaps they were more than acquaintances.
So why the games?
Why not just tell her the truth—why force her to circle it, piece by piece, like a trap waiting to close?
Unless p>
He needed her to remember on her own.
Or worse, he needed to see what she would remember.
Lara’s fingers curled slightly against the armrest.
Her voice was barely a whisper now.
The question lingered in the darkness, heavy and unanswered.
And for the first time, a flicker of something unfamiliar crept into her chest.
It wasn’t fear. Not confusion but something colder. Something far more dangerous.
Deep down, she was beginning to suspect that the truth wasn’t something she had lost.
It was something she had buried.
And if she found it again—
There might be no going back.