**Natalie’s POV**

> *"I'll tell him everything."*

>

Those four words didn't just leave her mouth—they executed me.

My blood turned to absolute ice. The temperature in the room plummeted into a crushing freeze, and my lungs completely seized up. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't draw in even a tiny sliver of air. It felt as though a pair of invisible hands had wrapped around my throat and squeezed with merciless force.

Behind Ava, Gavin was watching us. His towering silhouette loomed in the soft lighting of the grand foyer, his sharp features drawn tight with a mixture of dark fury and intense, flickering suspicion.

"Natalie?"

My heart didn't just race—it nearly jumped straight out of my chest. The sound of my name falling from his lips felt like a physical blow, a sudden volt of electricity surging through my terrified body.

Ava casually stepped away from me, her movements smooth, deliberate, and sickeningly graceful. She adjusted the strap of her designer handbag as if she hadn't just held a blade to my throat. As if she hadn't just threatened to obliterate every single piece of my existence. She looked completely relaxed, a picture of refined composure, leaving me standing in her wake—pale, trembling, and entirely undone.

I stared at her in pure, unadulterated terror.

"What did Ava say to you?" Gavin asked, his voice dropping an octave as he took a firm step toward us. His dark eyes locked onto my face, searching every micro-expression, reading the stark horror painted across my features.

My mouth opened, but nothing came out. Not a sound. Not a squeak. My vocal cords felt completely severed, paralyzed by the sheer weight of the catastrophe unfolding around me.

I looked at Gavin—his broad shoulders, his guarded, handsome face, his eyes that were beginning to narrow with deep concern. Then my gaze darted back to Ava. She was smiling. It was a faint, cruel curve of her painted lips, hidden from Gavin’s line of sight, meant only for me.

She knew my secret.

She knew the unforgivable sin I had carried into this house.

And in that agonizing second, as the silence stretched between the three of us like a tightening wire, a realization hit me so hard my knees almost buckled. It was a truth so terrifying, so profoundly overwhelming, that it rendered me breathless.

I had been sitting in this house foolishly believing I was the one hiding the truth from Gavin. I thought I was the master of this deception, holding the secret close to my chest, guarding it behind my own lies. But the reality was far more sinister. I wasn't the one hiding the truth—the truth had been hiding from *me*. It had been lurking in the dark corners of that rainy night, waiting, biding its time. And Ava hadn't just stumbled upon it; she had hunted it down. She had found it, unleashed it, and was now holding it like a loaded gun pointed directly at my head.

Ava looked at me, her sharp eyes taking in my hollow expression, drinking in the exact moment I lost myself in the abyss of my own panicked thoughts. She saw how completely paralyzed I was, how the ground beneath my feet had crumbled into dust.

I still hadn't replied to Gavin's question. The silence was becoming loud, suspicious, deafening.

Gavin took another step closer, his brow furrowing deeper. "Natalie. Answer me. What did she whisper to you?"

I swallowed hard, forcing my paralyzed muscles to obey, practically digging my fingernails into the palm of my hand to ground myself.

"N-nothing, babe," I managed to choke out. The lie tasted like ash on my tongue. The pet name felt like a betrayal in itself, a hollow shield I was desperately using to protect myself from the storm.

Just as the words left my lips, a sharp, violent buzz vibrated through the air.

It was my phone.

I was holding it tightly in my right hand, my knuckles white from the grip. The sudden vibration sent a jolt through my nervous system. Slowly, with hands that shook so violently I could barely keep hold of the device, I lifted the screen to my face.

A notification glowed brightly against the dark glass.

*1 New Message from an Unknown Number.*

My heart slammed against my ribs. My thumb hovered over the glass, suspended in a moment of pure dread. Every instinct in my body begged me to turn the phone off, to throw it across the marble floor, to run. But I couldn't look away. I tapped the message.

The screen shifted, opening a video file.

It loaded instantly.

The clip began playing. It was dark—shot through the heavy, torrential downpour of a storm. The rain streaked across the lens in thick, silver sheets, illuminated only by the harsh, flickering glow of headlights. But despite the darkness, despite the graininess of the footage, my brain instantly recognized the scene.

My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit.

It was the car. *My* car.

The front bumper was caved in, steam rising violently from the crushed radiator as rain poured over the twisted metal. And then, the camera angled slightly, focusing on the driver's side door as it creaked open.

I saw myself.

I watched in horrific, slow-motion detail as my own figure stepped out of the vehicle, stumbling onto the slick, wet asphalt. I saw the sheer panic in my posture, the way I covered my mouth in agony, the way I stared at the crushed luxury sedan sitting wrecked in the middle of the road. I watched myself approach his car, panic-stricken, before running back to my own vehicle and speeding away into the night like a coward.

My heart stopped beating entirely. The world around me went completely silent. The ambient sounds of the mansion—the quiet hum of the air conditioning, the sound of Gavin’s heavy breathing—all vanished, replaced by the terrifying, frantic rhythm of my own blood rushing in my ears.

*How?*

*How did Ava get this?*

How could anyone have captured that moment? It had been a deserted stretch of road in the middle of a storm. There had been no security cameras, no streetlights, no passing cars. Yet here it was, rendered in devastatingly clear detail, preserved on a screen in the palm of my hand.

Before I could even process the horror, I felt a shift in the air beside me.

Ava had closed the distance once again. She glided up to my side, her shadow falling over me like a suffocating blanket. Gavin made a move to step between us, his face darkening with anger, but Ava didn't care about him anymore. She didn't look at him. She kept her eyes fixed on my trembling frame, leaning her head right next to mine.

Her sweet, poisoned scent filled my nose once more as her lips brushed the shell of my ear.

"Imagine what Gavin will do," she whispered, her voice a cruel, velvet purr that cut through my remaining sanity, "if he sees this."