Olivia dropped her eyes to the floor, completely unable to meet anyone’s gaze. Her hands shook violently in her lap as she kept twisting her fingers together over and over, the suffocating silence pressing down on her like a ton of bricks. Nobody rushed her. They all just waited, hungry for every single ugly detail of the truth.

After sucking in a shaky breath, she finally forced herself to keep going.

"So... I sent Oriana a letter," she whispered, her voice barely loud enough to carry across the deck.

"It took months before I finally got a reply." A sad little smile flickered across her face for just a second before it vanished completely. "She apologized for taking so long and explained that all her Luna duties had kept her swamped, so she couldn’t write back any sooner."

Olivia swallowed hard around the massive lump in her throat.

"She also said she couldn’t tell her husband about me until we met in person. She wanted us to take a DNA test first so there’d be zero doubt that we were really twins."

Her fingers squeezed each other so tightly her knuckles went bone white.

Life could be so unbelievably cruel. For more than thirty years she had lived wrapped in luxury, respected and treated like a true Luna.

Now here she was, stripped of everything she had stolen, sitting alone while every person she once called family stared at her with pure disgust and hatred burning in their eyes.

It was impossible not to miss the life she had lost.

Still... deep down in her shattered heart, a tiny, desperate spark of hope refused to die. She kept clinging to the fragile dream that the man who had looked at her with love every single morning for decades might somehow find it in himself to show her even a shred of mercy and forgiveness.

That pathetic little hope was the only reason she decided to lay everything bare now instead of hiding.

"I hadn’t told Oriana anything about what I was going through," she admitted softly, "but her letter was incredibly detailed anyway."

Her eyes went distant as the memories flooded back.

"She even picked out a date for us to meet and gave me the address for the Grimroot Pack. She wanted everything handled face-to-face."

A bitter laugh slipped out of her before she could stop it.

"But... I never got the chance to go."

Heavy regret crashed down on her shoulders. Sometimes she couldn’t stop torturing herself with thoughts of how completely different everything might have turned out if she had only made it there sooner.

Maybe Oriana would have welcomed her with open arms. Maybe her sister would have protected her. Maybe she could have helped Olivia escape the living nightmare she was trapped in.

Maybe none of this horror would have ever happened.

Those what-ifs haunted her every single second.

Another part of her wished desperately that the truth had stayed buried forever. If Jasmine had just kept her mouth shut... if Seraphine had never shown up in Voren’s life, if every secret had remained hidden, they all could have kept living inside that beautiful, comforting lie until the day they died. After all, everyone died eventually.

Her lips started quivering uncontrollably.

"My husband..." The words got stuck in her throat like broken glass. "He treated me like I wasn’t even human."

The deck stayed deathly quiet. No one dared interrupt her.

"Even when I was pregnant, he would beat me senseless whenever he got drunk." Her breathing turned ragged and uneven. "He insulted me, humiliated me, and blamed me for every single thing that ever went wrong in his miserable life."

Without even realizing it, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself, almost like she could still feel those old bruises and wounds burning on her skin.

"The first time I tried to run away, he caught me before I even got very far." Fresh tears poured down her cheeks. "He locked me in a room for days. No food. Just enough water to keep me alive. I really believed I was going to die in there."

She squeezed her eyes shut tight. "After that... I was too terrified to ever try escaping again."

Not a single face in the room showed any sympathy. Not Vladimir, not Voren, not Seraphine, and definitely not even Kylie. The hell Olivia had survived didn’t erase the nightmare she had become for everyone else afterward.

Olivia noticed their cold, unforgiving expressions and dropped her head again in shame.

"When I finally gave birth to my daughter..." More tears blurred her vision until she could barely see. "He wouldn’t even let me hold her. He kept saying I wasn’t fit to be her mother. Most of the time he just sent her away to live with his own mother."

A painful, broken smile twisted across her tear-stained face. "I would hear her crying, and I couldn’t even go comfort my own child."

She wiped at her swollen eyes with the back of her hand.

"It took me two whole years before I finally got another chance to escape." The memory still made her heart hammer wildly in her chest. She had run without looking back, starving, exhausted, covered in bruises, jumping at every single sound behind her because she was afraid her husband would find her again.

Olivia glanced around the deck before continuing. Even now, no one sat near her. They all kept their distance like she carried some deadly poison. It hurt like hell, but she understood why.

"When I finally reached the Grimroot Pack that night..." Her voice grew softer, almost distant. "I was starving. I was completely exhausted. I could barely stand on my own two feet."

She closed her eyes again. "I begged the guards to let me see Oriana. They told me she was in labor." The memory played out so vividly in her mind it felt like it was happening all over again. "I kept insisting. I just wanted to see my sister. I wanted to tell her everything."

Her breathing turned shaky and broken.

"Then..." She stared down at her trembling hands. "I heard a baby crying."

For one tiny second, a small, sad smile curled her lips before it disappeared. "And after that, I heard the midwife say they couldn’t save her."

Olivia slowly lifted her head and looked at all the faces surrounding her, her eyes full of raw pain.

"You already know the rest..."