Chapter 23
Chapter 23
CAMILLE’S POINT OF VIE
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The scream ripped from my throat before I was fully awake, my body jackknifing upright in bed. Sweat soaked through my silk nightgown, heart hammering against my ribs like it might break through. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was, lost in the space between nightmare and reality.
Rose’s face, smiling as I drowned. Stefan watching from the shore, doing nothing. Their fingers intertwined as they witnessed my death, as casual as if they were watching a sunset.
“Ms. Kane?” A knock at my bedroom door. “Do you need assistance?”
The night guard. New guy. Torres or Torrez. I couldn’t remember his name. Victoria rotated security personnel regularly, another layer of protection in her perfectly orchestrated world.
“I’m fine.” I called back, voice steadier than I felt. “Just a dream.”
“Yes, ma’am. Dr. Reed has been notified as per protocol.”
Of course she had. Everything in Victoria’s mansion was monitored, measured, reported. Privacy was a luxury I’d surrendered along with my old identity. I checked the clock 3:17 AM. Another night ruined by memories that refused to stay buried.
Six months of training. Six months of becoming someone new. Six months of Victoria’s relentless program to transform me from victim to avenger. And still, my subconscious betrayed me, dragging me back into drowning dreams night after night.
My phone lit up with a text: My office. 15 minutes. -Dr. Reed*
No sympathy. No option to reschedule. Just a command thinly disguised as a message. Typical of Victoria’s handpicked psychologist.
I shuffled to my bathroom, splashing cold water on my face. The woman in the mirror had changed dramatically since Victoria had found me, cheekbones sharper from the surgical refinements, hair styled in an elegant bob, eyes harder from months of combat training. But in the hours after a nightmare, I still saw traces of the old. Camille beneath the carefully crafted exterior. Vulnerable. Afraid. Weak.
Dr. Reed would not approve.
Hero
office looked exactly as it always did, clinically organized, dimly lit, with two leather chairs facing each other across a glass table. No couch. No friendly plants of personal photos to soften the atmosphere. Dr. Reed didn’t believe in comfort during our sessions. The sharp angles and sterile surfaces matched her approach, precise, unforgiving, designed to cut through emotional defenses.
“Same dream?” she asked, silver–streaked dark hair pulled back in a severe bun, eyes sharp as they assessed my disheveled state. Al fifty–something, she had the toned physique of someone half her age and the penetrating Paze of someone who regularly dissected minds for sport.
“Yes” I sank into the leather chair, the cool surface a stark contrast to my overheated skin. “I’m in the car, Water rising Pose and Stefan watching from the bridge, smiling the door’s jammed. I scream for help, but they just watch. Rose whispers something to Stefan. He laughs. Then the water covers my face and.” My voice caught. “I start to drown.”
“Any variations from previous instances?”
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“Rose was wearing my wedding dress this time.” The detail had twisted like a knife in my gut, even in sleep..
Dr. Reed made a note on her tablet. “Six months of nightmares. Who told you stopping them was the goal?”
“Isn’t that what therapy is for? Healing trauma?”
“Conventional therapy, yes. But you’re not receiving conventional therapy, Camille. You’re receiving specialized psychological conditioning designed for Victoria Kane’s specific objectives.”
“Which are?”
“To weaponize your trauma rather than heal it. Your pain is power if you control it instead of letting it control you. Do you think Victoria became who she is by processing her grief in healthy ways? By moving on from what the Prestons did to her daughter?”
The bluntness hit me like a physical blow. She moved to a cabinet, retrieving a virtual reality headset. State–of–the -art, probably custom–made. Nothing but the best in Victoria’s world.
“Put this on,” she instructed. “I think you’re ready for immersion therapy. Time to control the outcome of your nightmare.”
My hands trembled as I took the headset. “You want me to relive drowning? Voluntarily?”
“I want you to finish what your subconscious starts every night. You wake up at the moment of drowning. I want you to see what happens after.”
The simulation was terrifyingly real, the car interior, the rising water, Rose and Stefan watching from above. Initially, panic seized me, the memory of that night too vivid, too raw. But something shifted inside me as I watched Rose’s smug smile. Rage sparked through my terror. Hot, clarifying rage.
The water stopped rising. Began to recede. In my mind, I pushed against the car door. It opened. Not possible in reality, not with water pressure, but this wasn’t reality. This was my mind, my rules. I stepped out of the sinking car, but instead of drowning, I rose. Moved upward through the water as if gravity had reversed.
I emerged from the river like an avenging angel, dressed in a tailored power suit, hair perfectly styled, makeup Пlawless, Rose’s smile faltered as I stood on the water’s surface. When I raised my hand, the bridge began to crumble beneath them.
“Please!” Dream–Rose cried out as she fell, reaching toward me. “Camille, help us!”
I watched, unmoved, as they plunged into the dark water. Dream–Stefan tried to swim toward the shore, abandoning Rose to save himself. Typical. Even in my imagination, he was a coward.
“How did it feel?” Dr. Reed asked when I removed the headset, hands shaking.
“Good,” I admitted, shame and satisfaction warring inside the. “It felt good”
“Then why are you crying?”
I touched my cheek, surprised to find it wet. “Because the person who enjoyed that isn’t who I used to be.”
“No,” she agreed. “She’s who you’re becoming. Who you need to be.”
She pulled out a manila folder filled with surveillance photos–Rose and Stefan together over the past months. At restaurants. Shopping. Entering his apartment. Their happiness documented in cruel detall. One shot showed them at a jewelry store I recognized, another at the restaurant I’d always wanted to try but Stefan had dismissed as overpriced. They were building their perfect life in the spaces I’d left behind.
“Study your enemy’s happiness,” Dr. Reed said coolly. “It’what you’ll take from them first.”
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I forced myself to look at every photo. Their casual intimacy. The way his hand rested at the small of her back. Her head tilted toward him in laughter. The tender expression on his face as he brushed hair from her eyes, a look he’d rarely given me.
“What do you feel?” she asked.
“Humiliation,” I whispered, the truth finally breaking free. “That everyone can see I was just the placeholder. The practice wife before he got the one he really wanted. I knew, you know. Even before the divorce papers. Before I found evidence. A part of me always knew Rose was the one Stefan truly wanted.”
“And beneath that?”
“I stayed because I couldn’t bear to admit Rose had won again. That even my marriage was just another competition she’d bested me in without even trying” The bitterness coated my words. “I thought if I tried harder, loved him more perfectly, he’d finally see me. Really see me.”
“But he never did,” Dr. Reed said simply.
“No. He only married me because he couldn’t have her. I was the consolation prize. The easier option. The one who would say yes when Rose initially said no.”
“The nightmares persist because you’re still seeing yourself as their victim. Even in your dreams, they stand above while you drown below. The VR session showed progress, you reversed the positions. But you’re still defining yourself in relation to them.”
At the door, I paused, struck by a sudden curiosity. “What truth were you hiding? When you helped Victoria after Sophia died?”
For the first time, Dr. Reed’s clinical mask slipped. “I was engaged to Victoria’s husband before she met him. He chose her instead. I introduced them. Watched their perfect life from the periphery. Was the first person Victoria called when the Prestons murdered Sophia.”
The confession stunned me. This cold, clinical woman had her own history of being second choice. Had watched from the sidelines as someone else lived the life that might have been hers.
“Does she know you told me this?”
“Victoria knows everything that happens in these sessions. Her gaze was steady, penetrating. “Because you’re ready to understand that the path forward isn’t about what was taken from you. It’s about what you choose to build from the wreckage.”
With that, she closed her office door, leaving me alone in the dimly lit hallway, clutching the photos of my sister’s stolen happiness against my chest like a shield. Each image a reminder of what they’d taken from me, and what I would take from them in return
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