Chapter 219: When I Was Just A Little Girl…

LOUISE’S POV

Mateo looks at her.

Louise shakes her head frantically. "You have to leave." She pushes against his chest, trying to force him away from her.

"Go."

Her voice breaks. "Please, go!"

He does not move.

She pushes harder. "Mateo, please!"

She needs him to understand. She needs him to see the place he has entered and realize that he has made a mistake. He has come looking for his little flower, but the little girl he remembers is gone.

She is not that girl anymore.

She is not the child who used to giggle when he tapped her nose. She is not the girl who saved her strawberry candies in a little tin box because she wanted to keep every small gift he gave her. She is not the innocent child who believed that being good would make people love her.

That girl died a long time ago.

Louise knows it. She has spent years burying her beneath expensive dresses, cruel smiles, and a heart that learned to harden before anyone could hurt it again.

She has hurt people. She has watched them cry and felt nothing. She has carried Alice’s messages like a faithful servant, delivering humiliation and suffering to people who had done nothing to deserve it.

She has used other people’s pain to make herself feel powerful. She has become the kind of person Mateo would have tried to protect her from.

And now he is here. He has followed her into this place.

"No!" Louise pushes at him again. "Go away!"

The words are barely understandable. The darkness has reached her throat, and every time she tries to speak, it feels as if something is squeezing her from the inside.

Black tears slide down her cheeks, and her little hands tremble against his chest. "Please. Please, you have to leave."

Mateo looks at her for a long moment.

He understands. She can see it in his eyes. He knows she is trying to save him. He knows she is terrified that the place swallowing her will swallow him too.

And then, instead of stepping away, he pulls her into his arms.

"No!"

Louise struggles. She twists, kicks, and pushes against him with all the strength her little body can find, but Mateo holds on. His arms close around her in a firm, crushing embrace, a bear hug so tight that it leaves no room for her to escape.

It is nothing like the gentle hug he gave her a moment ago. This one is fierce. It is stubborn. It is the kind of embrace that says he will not let go, no matter how hard she fights him.

Louise breaks. She pounds her tiny fists against his chest. "Let me go!"

She tries to scream. "Let me go, Mateo!"

But he holds her even tighter.

"My kind girl!" His voice rises above the valley. "My lovely Louise!"

The sound travels through the blackness, reaching the distant slopes and returning to her like an echo from a place she has forgotten.

Louise goes still. Her fists remain pressed against his chest.

He called her that. He called her his kind girl. He called her lovely.

The words hurt more than any insult she has ever received because she wants to believe him. God, how she wants to believe him.

She wants to bury her face against his chest and let him tell her that she is still the little girl he remembers.

She wants to pretend that nothing has changed, that she has not spent years becoming someone she would once have feared, that the kindness he saw in her as a child has survived somewhere beneath the cruelty.

But she cannot. She cannot lie to him. Not Mateo. Not the one person whose love she has never been able to dismiss as a trick.

"I’m not kind." The words are so small that she barely hears them herself. Mateo does not answer.

"I’m not." She presses her hands against his coat, trying to create enough distance to look at him. "I’m not your lovely girl anymore."

Her voice cracks. "You don’t know what I’ve done."

The faces in the shadows draw closer. Louise sees them.

A young woman with tired eyes and a face she has not allowed herself to remember for years. Timothy’s sister. The girl she bullied at school.

The girl whose clothes she mocked, whose family she ridiculed, whose life she helped turn into a miserable series of humiliations because Louise wanted to stake a claim on Orion.

She remembers the girl standing in a hallway with her head lowered while Louise laughed with the other students. She remembers the tears. She remembers the desperate request to be left alone.

And she remembers how she answered. She had smiled. She had told the girl that nobody would miss her if she disappeared.

Louise stops breathing.

The memory changes.

She sees a closed coffin, a grieving family, and a mother whose face has been emptied by a pain that no apology can repair. Timothy’s sister had left school. Then, later, she had taken her own life.

Louise had known. Of course she had known.

The news had reached her, passed from one person to another until it found its way into the halls of the Dubois estate. She had read the message and stared at the words. For a few seconds, she had felt something uncomfortable stir in her chest.

Then Alice had called her downstairs.

And Louise had put the news away.

She had gone to dinner. She had eaten. She had laughed when Alice made a cutting remark about someone else’s misfortune. She had decided that the girl had been weak, that she had made her own choices, and that Louise was not responsible for what happened to her.

She had repeated those lies until they sounded like the truth. Now the girl is standing in front of her. Her face is pale. Her eyes are empty. And she is looking directly at Louise.

Louise tries to turn away, but the face follows.

Then another appears.

A man whose business she helped destroy because Alice wanted his property. A woman whose engagement she ruined by delivering a false story to the right ears.

A young employee who lost his job after Louise accused him of stealing, even though she knew he was innocent. A mother who begged Louise to reconsider a decision that would leave her family without a home.