Chapter 3

My art studio was my sanctuary, the one place in our sprawling, opulent house that felt like it belonged to me and me alone. It was a sun-drenched space at the very top of the house, a loft with soaring ceilings and a large skylight, filled with the comforting, familiar scents of turpentine, linseed oil, and fresh canvas. It was where I went to breathe, to create, to remember who I was before I became Mrs. Liam Vance.

Until Seraphina, under the guise of "needing a quiet, therapeutic place to recuperate," made it her own. Liam had insisted, saying the light and creative energy would be good for her fragile psyche.

I came home from a painful follow-up appointment with the burn specialist to find the studio door ajar, a trail of colorful paint drops leading into the hallway. Inside was a scene of calculated, artistic destruction. My canvases, large-scale works that I had poured months, even years of my life into, were desecrated. A nearly finished triptych depicting the changing seasons of our first year together was slashed, the canvas hanging in limp, tragic ribbons. Tubes of black and garish red paint had been squeezed over a series of delicate charcoal portraits, leaving angry, violent streaks that looked like arterial spray.

Seraphina stood in the center of the chaos, a palette knife dripping with black paint still clutched in her hand. She looked up at me, her eyes wide with a feigned, childlike innocence. "Oh, Elara," she breathed, a small, sad smile playing on her lips. "I was just feeling so overwhelmed by all my trauma. The therapist said I should channel my emotions. I needed to... release."

The final confrontation happened not in the studio itself, but on the narrow, wrought-iron spiral staircase that led from the studio to a small attic storage space. It was a beautiful but treacherous piece of architecture, with a dizzying open space in its center. I was trying to salvage what I could, my hands trembling as I gathered my remaining supplies, when I saw her holding the last thing I had left of my mother: a small, hand-painted portrait in a simple wooden frame.

"This is so drab, isn't it?" she sneered, her voice losing its fragile edge and taking on a sharper, crueler tone. "It's really depressing the whole room. I think it needs some... color."

She made a show of letting the portrait slip from her fingers, holding it over the open center of the spiral staircase. I lunged instinctively, my only thought to save that precious piece of my past. My hands closed around the worn wooden frame in a desperate, clumsy grasp.

In that moment of vulnerability, as my entire focus was on my mother's face, Seraphina didn't just let go.

She pushed.

With a sharp, vicious shove to my shoulders, she sent me reeling backward. To save my mother's portrait, I couldn't grab the railing for support. I felt a horrifying moment of weightless suspension, a silent scream trapped in my throat, as I tumbled backward, not down the winding stairs, but into the open, unforgiving space in the center of the spiral. The world became a dizzying blur of iron and light before I landed with a sickening, final crack on the polished hardwood floor two stories below. My last conscious thought was of the small, intact portrait clutched tightly in my hand.