Chapter 41 Empty & Numb
Grace ran.
Her feet pounded against the linoleum floors, her breath coming in short gasps that had nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with the panic rising in her chest. Students pressed against lockers as she sprinted past, their faces blurring into meaningless shapes.
Grace burst through the front doors of the school and kept running. She didn't know where she was going. Didn't have a destination in mind. She just needed to move, needed to put distance between herself and that classroom, that truth she didn't know how to process.
She glanced at the paper in her hand the letters swimming before her eyes. AB negative. The words seemed to mock her with their simple scientific certainty.
Her whole life had been a lie.
The thought kept circling through Grace's mind, both relentless and inescapable. Every birthday party where Sarah had smiled and told stories about the day Grace was born. Every time Grant had pointed out some feature Grace shared with him, some mannerism she'd supposedly inherited. Every family photo, every moment of supposed connection, every time she'd told herself that family stuck together through the rough times.
All of it had been built on a lie.
Grant and Sarah weren't her parents. Had never been her parents. They'd raised her for eighteen years knowing she wasn't theirs, and they'd never said a word.
Grace's feet carried her down the street, past houses and shops she'd known her whole life. The world looked the same as it always had, but everything felt different now. Like reality had shifted slightly to the left and nothing quite lined up the way it should.
Who was she? If Grant and Sarah weren't her parents, where had she come from? Who were her real parents? Were they alive? Dead? Had they given her up willingly or had something happened to them?
And the biggest question of all: did Grant and Sarah know what she was? Did they know that she wasn’t quite human?
They had to.
But when did all these supernatural phenomena begin? When was the first time she felt much less human?
Her mind was a mess for the next minute, until recalling the day of the party when she’d met Enzo.
Yes… that was the first day she’d felt a strange power flow through her veins.
‘But what made that day so different?’
She recalled entering a little squabble with Dylan inside the bathroom, how he’d teased her and even dared to rip her necklace off and—
‘Huh?’
Necklace? The same one she’d tossed after disowning Grant and Sarah. The same day she’d been abducted…
The necklace had to be something.
Grace's grandmother, or the woman she'd thought was her grandmother, had given her that necklace. She had smashed it and immediately had her life changed.
‘Was it protection? Was the necklace protecting me?’
The moment Grace had that thought, it stuck. Her grandmother had known Grace needed to be hidden, needed to be protected from something.
From the wolves who would come looking for her. The rogue traders who'd kidnap and sell anyone with supernatural blood.
‘They knew.’ Grace's chest tightened as the realization settled over her. ‘They knew what I was and they never told me. Never prepared me. Just slapped a magical necklace on me and hoped it would be enough.’
Grace's mind was spiraling, spinning through memories and moments that suddenly looked different in this new light. Every time her parents had acted strangely, every deflection, every careful avoidance of certain topics.
She'd thought it was just normal parental weirdness. Turned out it was an eighteen-year-long deception.
For some reason, Grace's eyes weren't watering up. She wasn't crying, wasn't breaking down the way she probably should have been. The tears that had threatened once, when she stood in the hospital lobby never materialized.
She wasn't even sure how she felt. Shocked, yes. That was the predominant emotion. But underneath it was something else. Something colder.
Numbness.
Grace had shut her heart to Grant and Sarah after the hospital confrontation. Had stood in that room and broken her grandmother's necklace and declared they weren't her family anymore and had meant it with every fiber of her being when she'd said it.
She'd already cut them off emotionally, had already grieved the loss of the parents she'd thought she had.
Learning they'd been lying about being her family this whole time should have devastated her, it should have broken her heart all over again.
Instead, it just felt like confirmation. Like the universe was validating a decision she'd already made.
They'd betrayed her once by trying to sell her to Vance. Had abandoned her the moment she'd stood up for herself. And now she knew they'd been lying to her since the day she was theirs.
Grace felt numb to Sarah. Numb to Grant. Numb to the entire concept of them as her parents because they never had been. Not really.
‘Unless there was a good reason,’ some small part of Grace's mind whispered. Unless they had some explanation that made sense of all of this. Some reason why they'd raised you, why they'd hidden the truth, why they'd done any of it.
But even as she thought it, Grace wasn't sure she could forgive them. Not for this. Not for eighteen years of lies stacked on top of betrayal.
The only way she might, might be able to understand would be if there was a good damn reason why they'd raised her. Why they'd pretended she was theirs or why they'd kept the truth from her for so long.
And unless that reason was extraordinary, Grace thought she might never forgive them.
Grace pulled out her phone, her fingers fumbling over the screen as she tried to call Maddox. It rang once, twice, three times before going to voicemail.
"Hey, it's Maddox. Leave a message and I might get back to you."
Grace hung up and tried again. Voicemail. Again. Voicemail. She'd lost count of how many times she'd called by now. Five? Ten? More?
Each time it went to voicemail. Each time Maddox didn't answer.
Where was he and why wasn't he answering? She needed him. Needed someone, anyone who could help her make sense of this.
Grace looked around, trying to get her bearings, trying to figure out where her feet had carried her while her mind was spiraling.
The hospital.
Grace stood at the entrance to Briarview's General Hospital, the same building where she'd confronted Grant and Sarah days ago. Where she'd broken the necklace and declared they weren't her family anymore.
She didn't remember getting here. Didn't remember taking the bus or walking or anything. Had she taken the bus? The distance from school was miles. The sun had been high when she'd left class but now it was starting to sink toward the horizon, painting everything in shades of orange and pink.
How long had she been running? How far had she gone without realizing it?
Grace pushed through the hospital doors, her feet carrying her toward her destination on autopilot. She knew the route to Sarah's room by heart.
As she walked, Grace’s mind continued its chaotic spiral. She needed answers. Needed to confront them, she wanted to demand the truth about who she was, where she'd come from, and why they'd lied.
The hallway stretched before her. She walked past the nurses' station without stopping, her eyes fixed on the door at the end of the hall.
Grace pushed the door open and stepped inside.
She froze.
The room was empty.
Not just empty of people, it was empty of everything.
The bed where Sarah had been lying was stripped bare, the mattress visible and pristine. The monitors that had beeped steadily were gone. The IV stand, the personal items, the flowers, all of it was gone.
The room was sterile. Like no one had ever been there at all.
"Huh?" The sound escaped Grace's lips unbidden, confusion replacing the numbness for a moment.
‘Where were they?’
Grace stepped further into the room, her eyes scanning every corner as if Grant and Sarah might somehow be hiding. But there was nothing. No one. Just empty white walls and the faint smell of disinfectant.
They were gone.