Chapter 4

Alya Cobb POV:

Jason stayed by my bedside for three days, a caricature of a concerned husband. He brought me meals, fluffed my pillows, and read financial reports aloud in a dull monotone.

But his eyes were always on his phone. He was texting Genesis constantly. I' d see the corner of his mouth twitch into a smile, a softness in his eyes that was never, ever for me anymore. He was a million miles away, lost in a world she had built for him.

"You miss her, don't you?" I asked one afternoon, my voice raspy.

He looked up, startled, and quickly pocketed his phone. "What? No. I'm here with you."

The lie was so blatant, so insulting. I just closed my eyes. There was no point in arguing. He wasn't here because he cared. He was here to make sure I didn't try to run, to make sure I didn't cause any more trouble.

I thought about the man he used to be. The Jason who would cancel a billion-dollar meeting if I had a headache. The Jason who held me all night when I had a nightmare. That man was gone, replaced by this cold, obsessed stranger.

The woman he once cherished was now just an inconvenience. A problem to be managed. A joke.

The day I was discharged, the California sun was bright, but I felt nothing but a bone-deep chill.

In the car on the way back to the house, Jason broke the silence. "Genesis's birthday is next week. I need you to get her a gift."

I stared at him, incredulous. "You've got to be kidding me."

"I'm not," he said, his eyes fixed on the road. "I want you two to get along. This would be a good gesture."

"I will not buy a gift for the woman who is destroying my life," I said, my voice shaking with renewed anger. "I will not 'get along' with her."

The atmosphere in the car instantly dropped twenty degrees. Jason's jaw tightened. He pulled the car over to the side of the road with a screech of tires.

He turned to me, and his eyes were terrifying. All the feigned concern was gone, replaced by a glacial coldness.

"You will do it, Alya," he said, his voice dangerously low. "Or what's left of your mother in that urn... might just get scattered to the wind. It would be a very 'natural' return to the elements, don't you think?"

The threat hung in the air, suffocating me. He would do it. I knew he would. He would destroy the last piece of my mother I had left, just to please that woman.

A strangled sob escaped my lips. "You once said you loved me more than life itself," I whispered, the words tearing at my throat. "And now you use my mother's ashes to threaten me? You trample on my heart, you humiliate me, you nearly get me killed, and for what? For her?"

Tears streamed down my face. "You said you'd never let anything hurt me again, Jason. You swore it."

He just watched me cry, his expression unmoved. The man who used to wipe away my tears now seemed to derive a cold satisfaction from them.

"Your tears don't work on me anymore, Alya," he said flatly.

Something inside me snapped. The sobs stopped. I looked at him, and a bitter, broken smile touched my lips. He was right. Love was gone. All that was left was this ugly, twisted performance.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. "Fine," I said, my voice hollow. "What do you want me to get her?"

The gift he wanted was a rare "Moonpetal Lotus," a flower said to bloom only once a decade on a remote, sacred mountain. To get it, one had to show absolute piety.

It meant kneeling on the cold, hard stone steps of the mountain temple from dawn until the next dawn. A full twenty-four hours of prayer.

Then, it meant walking barefoot across a fifty-foot path of burning coals to the sacred grove where the single lotus grew.

For a week, I did it. I knelt until my knees were raw and bleeding. I walked across those coals, the searing pain shooting up my legs, every step an agony. I bit my lip until it bled to keep from screaming.

When I finally plucked that single, perfect white lotus, my body gave out. I collapsed, my feet a mess of burns and blisters, my body trembling with exhaustion and pain.

I dragged myself down the mountain and spent the next few days in bed, recovering from the ordeal, the lotus carefully preserved in a crystal vase. It was all for her. All for Genesis.