Chapter 2

My awareness felt like a fragile bubble shattering into a thousand pieces, bobbing aimlessly through an endless void.

When physical sensation finally returned, it was the heavy, muffled thud of my body being brutally tossed onto silk bedsheets. My spine slammed against the bedframe, sending a wave of dull agony radiating through me.

My vision hadn't fully adjusted, leaving me staring at violently swaying, blurred lights.

It was our bridal suite.

Kevin was methodically unknotting his tie. The elegance of his movements was genuinely horrifying. He walked over and began gently smoothing out the tangled layers of my wedding dress as he flattened the creases, as if he were arranging a beautiful mummy for display.

His voice echoed in the dead-silent room, sounding eerily hollow, "Don't rush, Alyssa. The game is just getting started. One hundred times, and you still haven't learned how to give up."

I lay paralyzed on the mattress, the toxins making my limbs feel like they were filled with wet concrete. I could feel cold sweat beading at my hairline, sliding down my cheek and into my ear. It was sticky and freezing.

When he turned his back to close the heavy blackout curtains, I bit down hard on the tip of my tongue to jolt my nervous system. Using the sheer dead weight of my body, I rolled off the mattress, hitting the wool rug with a heavy thud.

Ignoring any shred of dignity, I dragged myself like a crushed insect deep into the darkness under the bed. It was a complete blind spot, and I remembered hiding a paring knife I had stolen from the catering kitchen under there.

Beneath the bed was a suffocating void, smelling of stale dust and something else, like a faint, sickeningly sweet, metallic odor.

My hands scrambled frantically across the cold hardwood. There was no knife.

Suddenly, my fingertips brushed against something round and slick. The texture felt like a rubber ball soaked in water, but it had the horrifying elasticity of biological tissue.

I yanked my hand back in absolute terror, my heart stalling in my chest. Using the thin sliver of light bleeding in from under the bedroom door, I trembled as I leaned closer to look.

Inside the delicate glass casing, with clear preservation fluid, floated an eyeball.

It was a human eyeball. The severed optic nerve swayed slightly in the liquid like dead seaweed. But what froze the blood in my veins was the iris. It was a breathtaking, rare shade of pale amber gold.

They were the eyes of my twin sister, Olivia Lane.

She had been missing for three years. For three years, everyone told me she ran off with some guy, and Kevin was the only one who stayed by my side, constantly helping me search for her.

"Alyssa, what are you doing under the bed?"

Kevin's footsteps stopped right beside the mattress. I could see the polished toes of his oxford shoes less than four inches from my face.

"Did you find your sister?"

His voice dropped to a chilling whisper. A second later, he slowly crouched down. His flawlessly handsome face appeared upside down under the bedframe, staring directly at me. Then, he wore a grotesque, psychopathic smile.

Like a massive steel spring violently breaking, the suffocating darkness shattered.

I bolted upright from the chair, my chest heaving violently. Air shredded my lungs as I desperately gasped for breath.

The world around me aggressively reconstructed itself. I saw the harsh vanity lights of the bridal dressing room, the scattered makeup brushes, and my own reflection in the mirror. My face was spackled with foundation and pale as a corpse.

My back was drenched in cold sweat, the lace of my gown clinging to my skin with a suffocating stickiness.

In the mirror, my reflection stared back at me with terrified eyes. I slowly raised a trembling hand and touched my own eyelid.

Olivia and I shared the exact same rare, amber-gold eyes.

Why did Kevin have Olivia's eye? What the hell was Sophie's actual role in this nightmare?

The instinct to just run away was violently crushed by a masochistic, desperate need for the truth. I had to know. This wasn't just a murder; it was a psychological execution.

"Ms. Lane, Mr. Carter said to wait here in the bridal suite. He went to his study to grab something," the makeup artist said blankly as she walked into the room.

The study?

In the past 99 loops, I had tried jumping out of windows or sprinting into the lobby to scream for the police, but I had never once thought to enter Kevin's heavily guarded sanctuary.

I ripped the heavy veil out of my hair, hiked up my skirts, and sprinted barefoot down the long corridor toward the study. The plush carpet absorbed all sound; the only noise was my own ragged breathing echoing in the empty hall.

The heavy door was unlocked.

The room smelled overwhelmingly of rich sandalwood. My hands shook violently as I ripped open the desk drawers. Hidden behind the bottom drawer, my fingers grazed a concealed latch.

Click.

A secret compartment popped open. It didn't hold life insurance policies or a written murder manifesto like I expected. There was only a battered, black leather diary.

I flipped it open. The pages were completely blank, save for a single photograph, heavily stained with dark, dried blood.

There were three people in the picture.

A younger Kevin, wearing a crisp white shirt, was smiling brightly. Sophie was linking arms with him, grinning at the camera. And standing right between them, with Kevin's arm wrapped intimately around her shoulders, was a girl in a red dress, sporting an aggressive smirk.

That was Olivia.

My hands shook as I flipped the photo over. The back of the photo was dateless, marked only by a row of words in red ink. The strokes were frantic and distorted, nearly tearing the paper. The words practically radiated venom.

[Alyssa, you stole everything from me. I will make you pay for it with your life.]

It was Olivia's handwriting. But I vividly remembered Kevin swearing to me that he barely even knew Olivia.