The laptop screen went dark, the screen saver casting the sterile room in a shifting, abstract glow. Caspian didn’t move. He sat frozen, the afterimage of Isolde’s smile playing on a loop in his mind. A performance of pain. A celebration of deceit.
The staged violence on the screen dislodged something deep within him. A memory, visceral and raw, clawed its way to the surface.
Two years ago. A frantic call from Lyra, her voice small and tight with a fear she was trying to hide. He had driven recklessly, arriving at their old apartment to a scene of quiet horror.
Lyra, cornered in the kitchen. Her stepfather, a man reeking of whiskey and resentment, stood over her, his voice a low, menacing growl. Caspian remembered the look in Lyra’s eyes. It was not a performance. It was real, unfeigned terror.
A surge of protective fury, purer than anything he had ever felt, had seized him. He didn’t think. He acted. He had physically removed the man from the apartment, the man’s drunken protests dying in his throat at the cold promise of legal annihilation Caspian had leveled at him. He remembered holding Lyra afterward as she trembled, her quiet sobs muffled against his chest.
He had protected her from a real threat. From a real monster.
The contrast struck him with the force of a physical blow. He had saved Lyra out of instinct, out of a fundamental decency he hadn’t known he possessed. But he had “saved” Isolde out of arrogance. He had embraced her manufactured drama because it fed his ego, his desperate need to be a hero.
The ghost of the man he was that night—the true protector—rose up to shame the hollowed-out fraud he had become. The man who stood by while the woman he once defended was torn apart in the public square.
His mission crystallized, hardening from anger into something colder and heavier. This was no longer about exposing Isolde’s lies to salvage his own reputation.
This was about atonement.
It was about undoing the catastrophic harm he had inflicted upon the only person he had ever truly protected, and then so utterly betrayed.
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