gosh I promise I'll try to update frequently guys, I'm so sorry to leave you hanging!
love u all and happy new year Xx.

- - - - -

The first time I woke up, I would've certainly believed I was dead if not for the fact that I was lying in the back of a car--a car that didn't seem familiar at all--and we were moving.

I blinked groggily up at the roof of the car. The car jostled a bit and a soft groan left my lips. I didn't think I could feel any part of my body.

I tried moving my fingers alone but I couldn't. For a brief second, I panicked. Why couldn't I move? I couldn't feel any ropes around me or binding me. Why couldn't I move my fingers then? Did I even have my fingers?

Another small noise left my lips.

"Easy there, kid." Someone said from the front seat. "Go back to sleep. We haven't reached there yet."

Reached where? I wanted to ask. But I didn't. Because that voice sounded a lot like Jon and I...I trusted him, didn't I?

I didn't understand why a small, numb part of me still kept on panicking even then. Almost as if there was something there to panic about. I just couldn't remember what it was. Was there something I should've been doing? Something I should've not been doing?

So I gave into the other part of me. The one that reassured me everything was fine--a voice that strangely sounded like Jon's too.

I closed my eyes and drifted away.

• • •

The next time I woke up, I woke up screaming.

Because there was pain and pain and pain and it felt like someone had poured molten fire all over me. It burned and the sheer agony was too much.

"Hey, hey, it's fine. It's all right." Someone's hand brushed my shoulder and I couldn't breathe.

I felt hands on my throat and realized a bit belatedly that they were mine, frantic and hot, because I was heaving and gasping for air.

"Get it...off." I gasped, blinking, seeing only white that was too blinding. "Get it off!"

"Jesus, what's going on?"

"I don't know. What the fuck do I do?"

I was vaguely aware that I was hurting myself, or at least trying to, until someone pried my hands away, gripping them in a firm grip when I struggled.

There was a hand on my forehead and even that felt like it was leaving scorch marks behind on my skin. I think I was crying, sobbing to just get it off.

"Oh, sweet Jesus." Someone murmured. "She's grown so warm. A little too warm."

No, I wanted to say. I am burning.

"Fuck, that bastard." A growl this time before I heard a chair scraping against the floor. "He said she'll wake up and be fine! Oh, I'm going to see to it. That fucking, lying bastard--"

"Jon." The woman hissed and it was a relief, a fucking relief, when for a brief moment my vision started hurting a little less and when the pins drilling into my skull and every inch of my skin felt a bit bearable. "We both can see to that later. Right now, we take care of her, don't you think?"

I lifted my hands to the side of my head and they were trembling. Or maybe my whole body was. I choked out a sob and scrunched my eyes close, breathing out in short pants as I tried pushing it away. Everyone away. Why did it feel like someone was scraping my organs out?

God, it was agonizing.

"Dahlia, sweetie." A soft murmur near me and even that felt like a shout too painful. "It's going to be all right. Tell me where it hurts. Tell me if...can you hear me?"

I let out a soft whimper, the only affirmation I could've mustered right then, and turned to my side, curling in on myself and trying to block their voices out. How many of them were here? Was I safe? Were they hurting me?

Am I safe?

"Please." I managed to say, another cry leaving my lips when the pain just wouldn't go. "Please please...please."

"I knew we should've taken her to the Agency."

"We can't, Jon." The other voice said. Alarmed and scared and confused. "You know we can't. The Agency's emergency contact..."

The Agency, my mind seemed to catch on. I was at the Agency? But why did it hurt so much then? Why weren't they helping me? Couldn't they help me? Where was...where was Jade?

Cold tears trickled down my cheeks and I curled my fingers into my hair, digging the tips of them into my scalp. It took seconds, minutes, hours, maybe even days until the voices around me grew hushed, distant, careless. Until they were just unrecognizable whispers in the background. Until they'd stopped clawing at me.

Until the pounding in my head and my heart didn't feel so threatening anymore.

I blinked open my eyes, heavy and crusted with dried tears, and the tiniest of hiccups left my lips when the first thing I saw was the dark curtains pulled over a pair of large glass windows, not letting any light pass through. There was a tiny sliver of sunlight that still peeked through and it told me it was somewhere around morning right now.

Mornings were supposed to be refreshing. I felt anything but refreshed right now.

Sniffling, I slowly uncurled from the fetal position that I'd somehow gotten myself into and every muscle and joint of mine ached with this faint...faint presence of pain. I felt exhausted from something that I couldn't quite remember--not just yet.

Sitting up made my head swim but at least it wasn't as bad as it had been before. I gently uncurled my fingers from the duvet over me and stared around the room I was in. Something struck me right then--something as strong as a blow to the gut. 

Even without my glasses, I knew I wasn't at the Agency.

"Orias?" A croaky whisper left my lips.

There was no reply because there was no one here besides me.

"Orias?" I repeated a little louder this time, eyes scanning the room once again until they landed on the opened bedroom door. "Ori--"

I was interrupted by the shrill ringing of a phone nearby. Beside me, more specifically. Flinching, I shifted aside and stared at the phone on the bedside table as it rang with an incoming call. It wasn't mine.

I kept staring at it until I made out something else beside it, touching it carefully to feel the frames of someone's glasses. I picked them up and put them on, wincing at first but realizing the lenses perfectly aligned with my eyesight. The phone stopped ringing right then too, but only for a second before starting to ring again.

"Jesus, I've been searching every--" Someone came in from the opened door and stopped right there almost instantly when their eyes landed on me.

I blinked, slowly licking the dryness off my lips. "Linda?"

"Dahlia! Oh, dear, you're awake!" She exclaimed but in a way that wasn't an exclaim at all--much softer--and rushed towards me, her ringing phone all forgotten for the time being. "Jon just left the house or he would've been here and oh God, how do you feel, sweetie? Are you feeling any better? Should I get you more of the tonic? I probably should since--"

"Jon's h-here?" I asked her, looking behind her at the door. Something heavy and dreadful seemed to lift off my shoulders as Linda sat in front of me on the bed.

"Of course, sweetie. He just went out to run a few errands."

I blinked again and nodded.

"Should I get you some water?" She asked and there was a tiny furrow in between her brows. She seemed worried.

I shook my head. "No, I just...I'm just...I don't feel good." Lifting my fingers up to my stomach, I grimaced when they met a large bandage. I looked down and my head swam as I pulled up the shirt I was wearing and saw that the bandage was wrapped around almost my entire lower abdomen.

A gunshot, I thought, and then slow dread--the worst of its kind--started settling in because no, it wasn't a gunshot. It wasn't a gunshot.

"Hey, hey, it's all right." Linda neared me and caught my hands in hers. Only when she did that and stopped me that I realized I'd been trying to pull open the bandage. "Deep breaths, Dahlia. You're all right, do you hear me?"

I shook my head and my throat squeezed. I wasn't all right. No, no, I didn't think I'd ever be all right. Snatching my hands away from hers, I lifted my shirt again and felt around for a loose opening, pulling on it until the bandage started unraveling.

"Dahlia, sweetie, no." Linda sounded alarmed, trying to get me to stop, but I couldn't. I couldn't stop. "Don't--"

I threw the bandage away and looked down at my stomach. It was bizarre because my brain kept telling me there wasn't anything there, because I didn't feel anything there, but there was. There was a scar that should've been raw but wasn't. It was healed. I could see bits of blood crusted around the skin there but the rest was healed--the scar was the only proof left of the stab wound.

The stab wound. The stab wound. The stab wound.

"It...it shouldn't be." I stuttered over my words, fingers itching to touch the scar to know it wasn't just my eyes making it up, but I couldn't because I felt nausea creeping up my gut even when I was merely just thinking of it. "Can't be healed. I was bleeding. It was bleeding!"

There was a loud thud downstairs and cold dread made me stiffen. Linda looked over her shoulder and at the bedroom door, brows furrowed. "That must be Jon."

"What if it's someone else?"

"Dahlia--"

"How do you know it's not someone after me?" I breathed out shakily. Everything was ruined. Ruins and ashes and dust. "How can you even keep me here...here when you know!"

How worse was it? How long had I been unconscious for?

I was stabbed. I was stabbed. People are after me.

"Bloody hell, what the hell's even happening here?" Jon barged inside, eyes wide and raking around the room until they settled on us. On me. "Kid, you're awake."

I pushed aside the duvet and scrambled out of bed, stumbling and nearly falling over.

"What the hell are you doing? Sit down!"

I shook my head, expecting dizziness but strangely finding none. Instead, I just felt cold--a kind of cold that was nauseating. "I've got to go. I've got to...the Agency...Orias will be--" looking for me, was what I meant to say. But Jon cut me off as he stepped towards me, hands splayed out in a placating gesture, almost as if taming a wild animal.

I wasn't a wild animal. I've only had everything snatched from within me, I thought. Everything that mattered.

"Dahlia," he said, "what you need to be doing right now is resting. You're not fully healed yet, do you understand? It's dangerous what you think you've ought to be doing, and I frankly think you've been in a fair amount of danger for your whole fucking lifetime."

I kept shaking my head. I needed Orias. He'd make everything okay. He always did. He always knew how to fix things--fix the messes I made. I'd trusted the wrong people, done the worst of things, made some bad decisions. He'd know how to fix them.

"I am healed," I told him.

"You're not, kid."

"No, I am!" I yelled, fresh tears stinging the corner of my eyes. "Can't you see? I'm not bleeding anymore. I'm not dead." Even though I really really should be.

That rooftop, I had fallen from it. The wound on my stomach had bled until I'd gone unconscious. I could feel it, still feel the sticky blood coating my fingers and my clothes and my suit. My mask was gone. Ripped from my face.

I saw Linda covering her mouth with her hand and shaking her head. Jon gritted his jaw.

"There is no Agency, kid."

I blinked. "I've got to phone them. Orias or someone else--"

"Didn't you listen to me?" Jon stepped even closer, gripping my arms gently but firmly. "I've been trying to contact them for days, Dahlia. The headquarters are deserted. There's nothing there. No answers to all those phone calls I've made. Don't you think I would've already taken you to the Agency?"

I stared and stared and something cold trickled down my cheek and down my chin. "But he'd want to...Orias would want to see me," I whispered. Orias would know how to fix this.

Jon shook his head, pain and regret brimming in his eyes. "Not right now. You don't know...you don't understand how bad it's been, kid. These past few days--"

"Jon." Linda interrupted. "Not right now. Let her catch a few minutes to breathe in peace at least."

But I'd heard it. I'd heard enough.

• • •

CINDER GIRL'S TRUE FACE REVEALED.
Was the death of Mark DeSilva the end of many, or the very start?

• • •

"Who is Mark DeSilva?" I broke the silence the lounge had been filled with the moment Jon made me sit down on the couch with a cream cheese bagel in one hand and a glass of orange juice in the other.

Jon looked up at me from the newspaper in his hand, the same one with the big, bold headline on its back. I could've easily read below it with my glasses on but I really didn't want to. Not when just the headline was enough to rise all that dread within me.

I could see Linda from the windows, walking over to the mailbox and picking out the daily mail on her way, acting like everything was fine. Normal. It wasn't. Nothing was normal when they had me hiding in their house.

"He was..." Jon seemed to be contemplating before he sighed. "He was the boy who fell to his death from that building."

I nodded because I had somewhat already known.

"The boy I killed." I corrected him.

Jon frowned. "You made a mistake. They--These people think they know everything when all they know is one side of the story."

"They think I killed him and that's exactly what I did."

"No." Jon closed the newspaper and folded it. "No, you made a mistake. You didn't mean to kill him."

But I still did. I still killed that boy. And now everyone knew what I'd done. Everyone knew who I was, who Cinder Girl really was. Dahlia Winters was Cinder Girl, the one behind the mask, and the one who'd killed an innocent boy. A boy who'd had a family.

Everyone knew that and every other thing about me. How many of them hated me? How many of them would now place my face--innocent Dahlia's face--in front of all the mistakes Cinder Girl had ever made? And the person who I'd trusted the most, the one person I had--

"How did you find me?" I blurted out, bringing a halt to my overwhelming thoughts.

"Find you?" Jon questioned back, placing the folded newspaper aside.

"From that..." I trailed off and gripped the glass in my hand a little tighter. "From those woods when I got stabbed. The last thing I remember is being left there when I fell off the building from the rooftop. I remember..." Grey eyes. Blue and grey and cold and so full of remorse. A hallucination, what else could it have been? "I remember being left there for the dead."

Jon's gaze turned pitiful. By whom, his eyes questioned. I knew by whom. I knew and I wished I didn't.

"Kid, Jamie didn't--"

"I didn't say anything about Jamie." I snapped my gaze back at Jon, my heart racing at that name alone. A name I can't say or think or feel, I told myself. Not this second, or the next minute, or the next hour and day.

"You didn't." Jon agreed. "Linda asked me not to say it but I know you remember everything."

"How do you...why did you say Jamie?"

He gave me a look that said he knew. But how could he know? How could he possibly know? Jon hadn't been there. Or had he been? How was I to remember when I didn't want to think of a single second of that incident?

Jon only shook his head in response and got up.

"Did you see him?" I asked him weakly.

He didn't say anything, only came forward and tapped the plate in my hand, making me look down at it and the bagel I'd barely touched.

"Jon," I whispered, pleading. Desperate for what, I didn't know. I wanted him to answer me. I wanted him to tell me something that wouldn't make me feel sick. Something that would fix this all.

"Eat up, kid," he said. "You need all your energy back as soon as possible."

• • •

There were flyers outside the Reader's Den.

I noticed them from across the street and they were painfully obvious even under the night sky. I stood still in front of the wooden doors of the once-familiar bookshop, wondering for probably the hundredth time since this morning how I hadn't seen all of this coming.

I'd noticed a few large cardboard boxes situated at one corner of the lounge back at Jon and Linda's house. They'd seemed familiar and it had taken me a moment to recognize them from the storeroom at Jon's bookshop.

Now I understood why he had those boxes in his house.

The bookshop was trashed. The windows were smashed open in places. And then there were those flyers. Those flyers.

CINDER GIRL UNMASKED: A HERO OR A VILLAIN?

I collected them frantically, though I couldn't collect them all. Some were scrunched up in sad-looking paper balls and thrown on the ground while the others were stuck to the walls and wouldn't entirely come off. I still pulled off one after another and didn't acknowledge the way my hands trembled, not until I'd carefully stepped inside the bookshop and was looking over at the tiny glass smithereens.

The shelves were mostly empty save for a book or two. The counter where I was so used to seeing Jon was empty too, barren of all the stacks of papers he always kept there.

It didn't look like the bookshop I'd worked at for years. It looked empty and isolated.

Because of me, I reminded myself.

Making sure my hood was over my head, I inhaled shakily and went past the front shelves and towards the purple couch at the very back.

"At least you're fine," I whispered to it, breathing out softly when the patheticness of this all sank in. I was talking to a couch.

Crouching before it, I was about to look around for my extra suit that I always stashed here (hoping it still was here) my eyes fell to the foot of the couch, to the streak of dried old blood, and a dull metal object just hidden beneath it.

It was mostly hidden from view. The hilt of it was dark and almost camouflaged by the dark floorboards. Pushing my new glasses up my nose, I carefully pulled it out from under the couch and swallowed. It was a knife. A sharp dagger coated with more dried blood.

I stared at it, at the blood, and my heart raced.

This was it, wasn't it? "You stabbed me," I whispered to the knife.

Just let them see me talking to inanimate objects, I thought, and I won't just be a villain but a loony of this town as well.

With a great amount of care, I pocketed the knife for reasons I didn't quite know and lifted one of the couch seats. My spare suit was there thankfully and despite it being covered mostly in dust and cobwebs, the headset that connected back to the Agency comms seemed to be working.

I gingerly picked the mask in my hands and pressed the headset button, lifting it to my right ear. A short beep resounded, followed by a "Connection error. No receiving message found."

I tried it again and a third time for a deep measure, but every time I got the same response. Which only meant no one at the Agency was getting my signals.

Jon had said exactly that, I thought. The Agency hadn't answered any of his phone calls, he'd said. The Agency had been deserted. What could've happened in the time I'd been unconscious?

With newfound dread and fear for my home sinking in--fear for Orias--I stood up and headed back for the doors, ready to leave and maybe have a clear conversation with Jon this time without him dodging my questions. I needed to know. I needed to know how much was ruined and if there was anything, anything that I could still save. Or maybe just fix, if I couldn't save.

God, hope was such a fickle thing.

Because right as I was about to step out, something crunched beneath my shoes. I looked down to see a newspaper article torn in the most heartless of ways. I picked it up, ready to place it aside when something caught my eye.

Orias's face at the very middle. A familiar picture of him that the media used very often. The same one was on the very article too. I couldn't help but read then.

"...the Agency's head, Orias McCain, spoke in a somewhat favor of the current situation. He spoke, "It wasn't known to us. Those weren't the orders and Recruit Seven went against the very conduct, the very foundations this organization is built upon. I refused to even entertain such notions and now we are finding out about this together. The poor DeSilva boy and what unfortunate fate he came down to. As the head of the Agency, it is deeply disappointing to me to hear the news at the same time as all our citizens got to hear it. I would like to add..." "

Stopping right there and not reading any further, I went back to the first line and read it again because clearly, I must've read something wrong. Those words didn't make sense. Any sense.

But even the second time, the words remained the same. The article remained the same. And Orias's picture remained there, right there, staring back at me. Putting a heavy burden on those very words that were printed right there.

Oh, I thought as the realization came with a heavy and sharp and poisonous piercing in my chest in a way that seemed as worse as a punch to the gut.

Oh, indeed.