Damien Hayashi carried a secret the public had never been told. He had been married once before Sarah, a union that lasted only a month.

The woman had cheated, and Damien had buried the Chapter so completely that even his closest staff did not know it had existed.

Except Sarah.

So, when Sarah first learned that her son had been steered into a low-level tunnel because of a half-sister, anger arrived faster than thought.

How dare anyone use a fake sister to manipulate her son!

She had been certain the girl belonged to Damien’s first wife and the man that wife had run to. The math was clean enough; the dates lined up.

A bastard child of an unfaithful ex-wife was a far more believable scandal than her husband fathering a daughter.

After all, that woman would never be silent if she had birthed a daughter for him.

She ordered the DNA test before she called her husband.

The result returned within the hour: the child was Damien’s. She performed several more tests, and all the results were the same.

The child was Damien’s! There was no mistake.

That was why, without even contacting Damien, she had come to the hospital with a plan to offer the girl a sum large enough to seal her mouth for the rest of her life.

She had walked into the room ready to enforce that offer with whatever pressure the Hayashi name could apply.

But the moment she saw the girl, every plan dissolved. A single thought replaced the rest: She will be my daughter from now on.

Sarah’s gaze settled on Ayla.

The morning light came through the window in clean panels. Silver hair fell in soft strands across the girl’s shoulders.

The gold in her eyes was not the gold of jewelry or coin; it was a deeper color, the kind that had patience folded into it.

The eyes blinked, slow and unhurried, and the blink alone made Sarah’s chest tighten.

The girl’s face was small, soft, and perfectly arranged in a way that did not feel possible. A faint natural flush sat in her cheeks.

Her lips parted slightly, as if she had just finished a thought too small to say aloud but important to her.

Dimples appeared when her mouth curved—shallow and quiet, the kind of dimples that turned a polite expression into something that asked to be protected.

Innocent. That was the word Sarah’s mind reached for first.

She studied the girl another long moment and arrived at a conclusion that surprised her: Damien’s genes had not gone within a kilometer of this child.

The realization arrived as both a relief and an insult. It was a relief because Sarah’s own genes would not be ruined by Damien’s, yet an insult because it meant the girl had inherited everything from her mother.

The notion of her husband once falling in love with a woman and being heartbroken by her had always been an insecurity for her.

Still, she didn’t look like that bitch.

Sarah had seen the mother once, in a society photograph she had not been meant to see. The woman had been pretty in an ordinary way, the way many women were pretty before age caught them.

Comparing that woman to the girl in the bed felt like comparing dirt to a diamond. If the DNA report had not confirmed it, Sarah would have laughed at anyone who suggested either of those two had contributed to this child.

She filed the comparison away. The girl was hers now; the provenance no longer mattered.

The officer at the wall, who had been holding the same breath for some time, finally exhaled.

He glanced at his radio, then at the woman who had decided, in the span of a coffee break, to add a teenage daughter to one of the most photographed households on Earth.

He decided his career did not extend to this conversation.

He stepped backward toward the door.

"Madam. Sir. I will inform the Mayor that the family is taking the young lady into custody under the family registry. The Mayor’s interview can occur tomorrow at the Hayashi residence."

"Tea will be served," Sarah said, without looking at him.

"Yes, Madam."

The officer left, and the door clicked shut. Sarah turned her full attention back to Ayla.

The fury, the love, the grief, the protectiveness, and the mathematical certainty that her husband would suffer in detail for this all rotated behind her eyes in a steady circle and resolved, again, into the same single line:

"My poor child."

Ayla allowed her hand to be taken. Inside the catalogue at the back of her mind, a new shelf opened a little wider.

She did not lock it. She let the warmth in, although she wondered something.

"Why’d you call that woman a bitch?"

"Eh?" Sarah’s eyes widened. Panic settled into the corners of her expression.

’Did I say that out loud?’

She wanted nothing more than to slap herself.

"You must have heard wrong. Haha!" She flailed her hands and shot Kenji a look that begged for rescue.

Kenji rolled his eyes.

What followed was an hour of interrogation thinly disguised as bonding.

Sarah barraged Ayla with questions: what she liked, what she hated, what excited her, and whether she had a boyfriend.

Each answer prompted three more questions; each pause prompted another wave.

Sarah finally rose from the bed only because she remembered the welcome dinner needed to be arranged before evening, and Hayashi welcomes were not improvised on short notice.

She kissed Ayla on the forehead, swept out of the room with her phone already at her ear, and left a faint cloud of expensive perfume behind her. The door clicked shut.

Kenji crossed the room in three steps and pinched the nerve at the side of Ayla’s neck.

And then his vision went dark.

[You have been slain.]

[Ayla rejected your regression request.]

"What did you want?" He shouted the question the moment he opened his eyes again, then froze.

His mother stood in the doorway. He turned his head slowly toward the clock on the wall. The time read five minutes earlier than the moment Sarah had left.

"Kenji. Why are you shouting at your sister?" Sarah’s voice cooled in the particular way that had always made grown men in Damien’s office develop sudden, urgent appointments elsewhere.

"Can you not see she is frightened?"

Kenji’s spine went stiff. If anyone in this world had ever managed to terrify both him and his father, it was his mother, and that person was now staring at him in anger.

Sarah began a scolding that would, under normal circumstances, have stripped paint from the walls.

Kenji heard none of it. A single thought filled his head and crowded out everything else: She can control the regression timing now.

Before, the rules had been simple. She accepted his regression and they returned together to his last anchor.

She rejected it and he came back to life at the spot where he had died. Two options. Two outcomes.

Now, she could choose any point in between.

He tried to recall what had happened in the tunnel after the system confirmed the clearance. He remembered the contribution screen.

He remembered turning to her with something close to relief in his chest. He remembered stepping forward to pull her into a hug.

After that, there was a blank, then the hospital ceiling.

His physical body had been moving the whole time; he was certain of that. The walking out of the tunnel, the cover story for the officer at the gate—but the movement had not been his.

His soul or his mind, whichever word fit, had been somewhere else for those minutes.

His hands curled at his sides. Sarah’s voice reached him again, softer now, as the scolding wound down into something closer to a sigh.

"Kenji. Are you listening to me?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Apologize to your sister."

He turned to face Ayla. She sat propped against the pillows, the same way she had been five minutes ago. Her gold eyes were bright; her dimples were small.

"I am sorry, Ayla."

"It is fine, brother."

When she said that word, brother, he noticed how her brows curled in a boast. Sarah’s expression melted.

"Oh, the two of you. Come here. Both of you." She crossed the room and pulled them into an embrace that contained more strength than her tailored frame should have held.

Kenji’s chin came down against the crown of his mother’s head. Ayla’s cheek pressed lightly against Sarah’s collarbone.

Over Sarah’s shoulder, Ayla met Kenji’s eyes. The message moved between them without either of them speaking.

Behave.