Seven years ago.
The motel room smelled of cheap bleach and something sadder—loneliness, maybe. The walls were thin, and the rain outside hit the window in slow, exhausted taps. Selene wasn't Selene yet. Back then, she was Liliana Vale, eighteen years old and full of bruised hope.
She sat cross-legged on the faded carpet, folding paper cranes while her sister laid on the bed, coughing into a tissue already stained red.
"Stop that," Liliana said gently. "It doesn't help."
Across the room, Mira Vale—older by three years, and already ghost-pale—laughed weakly. "You think origami is gonna save me?"
"No. But I think it's the only thing we can afford that doesn't come with side effects."
Mira's smile was tired but real. "You're gonna be dangerous one day, Lil. You've got that kind of rage that dresses itself up in sweetness."
Liliana paused in her folding. "I don't want to be dangerous."
"You will be," Mira said, coughing again. "It's in your blood."
The two of them had been running for almost a year. After their parents died in a house fire labeled accidental, Mira started working odd jobs under the table—waitress, courier, occasional "hostess" for men who paid too much for conversation and too little for consent. She never told Liliana the details.
Then Mira got sick.
And insurance was never a luxury they'd been allowed.
Liliana did what she could. Shoplifting. Faking scholarship applications. Writing essays for kids at school who had last names that opened doors. Nothing was ever enough.
Until Mira started mentioning a man named Victor.
"He says he knows people," Mira had said. "People who make things disappear. Debt. Disease. Even names."
Liliana never trusted men like that. But Mira, caught between coughing fits and hopeful delusion, thought this one was different. Said he wore perfect suits and gave her blue orchids.
"Promise me something," Mira whispered that night in the motel bed.
Liliana looked up.
"If I die... don't let it be for nothing. Don't let them forget me."
Liliana didn't answer with words.
She reached over and clasped Mira's thin fingers, folding them gently around the paper crane she'd just finished.
It was the last night they ever spoke.
Mira died two days later, alone in a hospital hallway with a forged ID and an unpaid bill.
The man who had promised her a cure? He was already gone.
His name was Victor Harrow.
Back in the present, Selene sat in the corner of Victor's penthouse bedroom, long after he'd fallen asleep beside silk sheets and silent guilt. She stared out at the city below, holding a paper crane in her hand—folded from the label of a wine bottle she hadn't drunk.
Mira had once told her she'd be dangerous.
She was right.
And now, the man who'd watched Mira die in silence was lying just feet away.
Unaware that death had already let itself in.