𐙚˚࿔ Scarlett POV 𝜗𝜚˚⋆

The tea had gone cold.

It sat in a fragile, gold-rimmed porcelain cup that cost more than a regular family's monthly rent, the surface of the amber liquid completely still. Scarlett stared into it, watching her own reflection warp against the curved ceramic.

At sixteen, her face still carried a trace of childhood softness around the jawline. But her eyes—the eyes she had brought back with her from a dark, wet asphalt road at twenty-two—looked like deep, stagnant water.

Around her, the dining hall didn't stop. It never stopped.

"The charity gala is on the tenth, Salvatore," Evelyn said, her voice a perfect, melodic hum as she delicately buttered a piece of artisanal toast. She didn't look at her husband; she looked at the social calendar synced to her tablet. "The committee asked if we would be hosting the opening reception this year. I was thinking the conservatory would be lovely if the orchids bloom in time."

Salvatore didn't look up from his financial brief. "Have the secretary clear my evening after seven. Coordinate with the security detail if the guest list exceeds fifty."

"Of course." Evelyn smiled, a soft, practiced expression that reached her cheekbones but left her eyes entirely vacant. Then, her gaze drifted naturally to the right. "Stella, darling, make sure your white gown is pressed by Tuesday. The designer sent over the altered silk bodice yesterday."

"I already checked it, Mom," Stella replied, her voice the definition of sweet humility. She looked up, offering a small, comforting smile that seemed to say I'm just happy to be included, even though everyone in the room knew she was the centerpiece. "It fits perfectly. Thank you for remembering."

"You never have to thank me for that, sweetheart," Evelyn murmured, her tone melting into a genuine, instinctive warmth that made Scarlett's throat tighten.

It was a small word. Sweetheart.

But to Scarlett, it felt like a heavy physical blow to the chest.

In her past life—the messy, pathetic, agonizing one she had spent twenty-two years ruining—that specific tone of voice had been her obsession. She had been starved for it. She had been a feral, desperate thing inside this pristine mansion, clawing at the walls, screaming at the top of her lungs, throwing tantrums, and breaking expensive vases just to get Evelyn to look at her with an expression that wasn't exhaustion or disappointment.

Look at me, she used to beg silently while shouting something loud and offensive at the dinner table. Look at me. I'm your real daughter. I have your eyes. Why do you look at her like she's yours, and look at me like I'm a ghost haunting your perfect house?

Scarlett closed her eyes for a split second, and the memories didn't just flash—they dragged her under.

She remembered her fourteenth birthday. It was the year after Stella's mother had passed away and Stella had been brought into the Salvatore household as an orphan of a distant relative. Scarlett had wanted a loud, bright party. She had invited dozens of classmates she barely knew, desperate to show off her wealth, desperate to feel important. But that morning, Stella had come down with a sudden, stress-induced fever from adjusting to her new environment.

Evelyn had stayed upstairs in the guest room for hours, holding Stella's hand, wiping her brow with a cool cloth.

When Scarlett had stormed into the room, dressed in an expensive, over-the-top pink dress, crying and demanding to know why her mother wasn't downstairs to welcome the guests, Evelyn had looked at her with such profound, quiet disgust that Scarlett's breath had caught in her throat.

"Can you not be selfish for one day, Scarlett?" Evelyn had whispered, her voice sharp with a fatigue Scarlett hadn't understood yet. "Stella has lost everything. You have everything. Why must you always make everything about yourself?"

That day, Scarlett had gone down to her own party alone. She had laughed too loudly, danced too wildly, and drank stolen champagne behind the hedge maze until she threw up on her shoes. She had made herself a laughingstock, a loud, spoiled brat in the eyes of high society. But inside her chest, she had just been a little girl bleeding out, thinking, If I can't make them love me by being good, I'll make them notice me by being bad.

What a waste. What a pathetic, humiliating waste of a life.

"Scarlett."

The sharp, clipped baritone of her father cut through the memory like a scalpel.

Scarlett opened her eyes, her fingers tightening around the cold handle of her teacup. She didn't look up immediately. She took a slow, deliberate breath, forcing the phantom taste of bile and cheap champagne out of her mouth.

"Yes, Father?" she asked quietly.

Salvatore was looking at her now. His dark eyes were calculated, analytical, studying the way she sat. For the past three days since she had woken up in her sixteen-year-old body, she hadn't thrown a single fit. She hadn't interrupted Stella. She hadn't demanded a larger clothing allowance. She hadn't screamed at the maids because her favorite silk ribbons were misplaced.

She had just been... there. A quiet, heavy shadow.

"Your guidance counselor called the office yesterday," Salvatore said, leaning back slightly, his tablet turning black on the table. "They mentioned you missed your elective registration deadline. Again."

Beside him, Adrian didn't look up from his phone, but his thumb paused its scrolling. Noah shifted slightly in his chair, leaning his elbow on the table, his eyes darting toward Scarlett with a mix of casual amusement and practiced indifference. They were waiting for the explosion. They were waiting for her to flip her hair, slam her fork down, and scream that school didn't matter, or that the counselor hated her, or that Stella had probably stolen her forms.

That was the script. That was what Scarlett Salvatore did.

"I'll take care of it today," Scarlett said.

Her voice was entirely flat. No anger. No defensive edge. No tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

The dining hall fell into an unnatural, suffocating stillness.

Evelyn's butter knife paused against the toast. Stella's eyes flickered, a tiny, almost imperceptible micro-expression of confusion crossing her perfect features before she masked it with a look of soft concern.

"If you need help with the elective forms, Scarlett," Stella offered gently, her hand reaching across the small gap between their placements on the table, "I already finished mine. I can show you how to navigate the portal. I know it can be a bit confusing when you leave it to the last minute."

In her past life, Scarlett would have slapped that hand away. She would have screamed, 'I don't need your charity, you fake!' and Evelyn would have scolded her, and her father would have looked at her with that cold, silent disappointment that cut deeper than any knife, and Stella would have looked down, playing the victim perfectly.

This time, Scarlett didn't move. She didn't flinch. She just looked at Stella's extended hand.

It was a beautiful, manicured hand. Soft. Never broken.

"No, thank you," Scarlett said, her gaze lifting to meet Stella's eyes directly. "I can read the instructions myself."

She didn't say it meanly. She said it like she was stating the weather. It was the complete lack of emotional heat that made Stella's hand freeze in mid-air before slowly, awkwardly pulling back.

"Scarlett," Evelyn said, her tone taking on that familiar, weary edge. "Stella is just trying to be kind. There is no need to be cold to your sister."

Sister.

A lump of pure, unadulterated bitterness rose in Scarlett's throat, so thick it nearly choked her. She looked at Evelyn—the woman who had carried her for nine months, the woman whose validation she had literally died trying to obtain.

In her past life, when she was nineteen and completely unraveled by her obsession with Zyan, she had come home crying after Zyan had walked past her at a gala without even nodding. She had been drunk, messy, her mascara running down her face, begging her mother to just hold her. And Evelyn had stayed on the sofa, refusing to touch her, telling her she was ruining the family name with her unhinged behavior.

"You are so deeply embarrassing, Scarlett," Evelyn had said that night, her voice trembling with a mix of shame and disgust. "Why can't you be more like Stella? She never causes a scene. She never makes us regret taking her in."

Why can't you be more like Stella?

The phrase had been the soundtrack to Scarlett's entire youth. It had been the poison she drank willingly every single day, thinking that if she just changed the color of her hair, or wore the clothes Stella wore, or tried to smile the way Stella smiled, someone would finally choose her.

Nobody had ever chosen her.

When the car hit her at twenty-two, she had been entirely alone in a small, rented apartment outside the city, having been quietly cut off from the family fund because she wouldn't stop causing public scandals over a boy who didn't even know her middle name. Her family hadn't even been there to identify the body. The butler had done it.

"I wasn't being cold," Scarlett said now, her voice so soft it was almost a whisper, yet it carried clearly across the silent room. She looked directly at Evelyn, her eyes unblinking. "I just said I could read. Is that an insult in this house now?"

Evelyn gasped slightly, her hand going to the pearls at her neck. "Scarlett! Your tone—"

"Evelyn," Salvatore interrupted, his voice dropping an octave.

The table went dead silent. He didn't look angry; he looked intrigued, his sharp eyes fixated on Scarlett's face like he was trying to solve a complex corporate riddle. He had spent sixteen years dealing with a daughter who was a hurricane of unfiltered emotion. This creature sitting across from him—this girl who looked like his daughter but spoke with the terrifying, hollow weight of a woman who had already lost everything—was entirely unfamiliar.

"Let her be," Salvatore said coldly. "If she says she will handle the elective registration, she will handle it. If she fails, it is her own transcript that suffers."

"Thank you, Father," Scarlett said.

She stood up. She didn't slam her chair back. She slid it out quietly, her movements graceful in a way she had never bothered to practice before. She hadn't touched a single bite of her food. Her stomach felt like a knot of rusted iron, but she didn't care.

"I'll be in the car," she murmured to no one in particular, turning away from the table before anyone could give her permission to leave.

As she walked down the long, echoing hallway toward the grand foyer, her footsteps felt incredibly heavy. The mansion felt larger today, colder, like an expensive mausoleum built to house the ghosts of things that could have been.

She wanted to live.

That thought hit her suddenly, so sharp and piercing it made her stumble slightly near the front door.

She didn't want to just survive this timeline. She didn't want to just sit in her room and hide until she turned twenty-two again. She wanted to live. She wanted to know what it felt like to wake up in the morning without a hollow ache in her ribs. She wanted to know what it felt like to do something because she wanted to do it, not because she was trying to force a reaction out of a family that had already written her off as a lost cause.

She wanted to go to the beach. She remembered seeing the ocean once during a miserable family trip where she had spent the entire time crying in her hotel room because Adrian and Noah had gone jet-skiing with Stella and left her behind. She had never actually touched the water. She wanted to feel the salt on her skin. She wanted to eat street food without worrying if the high-society tabloids would take a picture of a Salvatore acting "low-class."

She wanted her life back. Her own life. Not the one dictated by the Salvatore name.

"Scarlett."

She paused, her hand hovering over the heavy brass handle of the front door.

She turned around slowly. Adrian was standing at the end of the hallway, his hands shoved into the pockets of his tailored school trousers. He looked tall, imposing, every bit the perfect heir their father had raised him to be. He was eighteen, two years older than her, and in her past life, she had spent years trying to get him to look at her with something resembling brotherly affection.

She used to bake things for him—horrible, messy cookies that she would burn because she didn't know how to use the kitchen—and leave them outside his study door. He had never eaten a single one. The maids always threw them away.

"Don't waste your time with things that don't yield results, Scarlett," he had told her once when she was fifteen, looking at her tears with genuine, sterile confusion. "If you want my respect, improve your grades. Emotional displays are useless."

"What is it, Adrian?" she asked, her voice sounding tired even to her own ears.

Adrian walked down the hallway toward her, his footsteps measured. He stopped a few feet away, studying her face with that serious, analytical gaze.

"You didn't eat breakfast," he said.

Scarlett let out a small, hollow breath that might have been a laugh if there was any joy left in her. "Since when do you care about my caloric intake?"

Adrian didn't blink. "You usually make a scene when Father mentions your grades. You didn't today. You didn't even look at Stella when she offered to help."

"I told you yesterday, Adrian," Scarlett said, leaning her head back against the heavy wood of the door, looking at him with an exhausting, centuries-old fatigue. "I'm just quieter now. Why does that bother everyone so much? You all spent years telling me to shut up. Now that I finally have, you're all standing around looking at me like I grew a second head."

Something shifted in Adrian's eyes—a flicker of something raw, something that looked dangerously like guilt, before his logical, disciplined mind clamped down on it.

"It doesn't bother me," he said flatly. "It's just inefficient. Unpredictable behavior is a liability."

"Then don't predict me," Scarlett whispered, turning her back on him. She pulled the heavy door open, the bright morning air hitting her face like a slap. "Ignore me. You've all had sixteen years of practice at it. It shouldn't be that hard to continue."

She stepped out into the blinding sunlight, leaving him standing alone in the dark, empty hallway of the house that had never been a home.

The black sedan was waiting for them at the bottom of the steps. The driver, a middle-aged man named Thomas who had worked for the family for a decade, held the door open for her. He looked at her with a tiny, cautious glint of sympathy in his eyes—he had seen her cry in the back of this car more times than he could count.

"Good morning, Miss Scarlett," he said softly.

"Good morning, Thomas," Scarlett said, stepping into the plush leather interior. She slid all the way to the far side, pressing herself against the window, wanting to leave as much space as possible for Stella, Noah, and Adrian when they inevitably followed.

She rested her forehead against the cool glass, watching the morning mist slowly rise from the manicured lawns of the estate.

She was sixteen. She had her whole youth ahead of her.

But as she watched her brothers and Stella walk down the steps a few minutes later, laughing softly at something Noah had said, Scarlett felt a tear finally slip down her cheek, hot and silent.

She didn't want to hate them. Hating them took too much energy, and she was so, so tired. She just wanted the phantom ache of her twenty-two-year-old death to stop throbbing in her chest. She wanted to forget the sound of the screeching tires. She wanted to forget the coldness of her father's voice at her funeral—if he had even gone.

I'm going to fix it, she promised herself, her fingers digging into the fabric of her school skirt until her knuckles turned white. Not for them. Not to make them sorry. But so I can finally, quietly, leave this place and never look back.

The car door opened, and the scent of Stella's expensive, floral perfume filled the enclosed space, suffocating and sweet.

Scarlett didn't turn her head. She just kept her eyes on the road outside, watching the gates of the Salvatore estate open up, waiting to step back into a world that she had once let destroy her. This time, she would hold the wheel.

                                                                                   𐙚˚࿔ thank you𝜗𝜚˚⋆

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