<b>A loud crash shattered the fragile silence, the sharp sound of glass breaking echoing through the house. Irene flinched, her small hands gripping the velvet armrest of the couch as her breath came quicker. Then came the shouting.</b>
<b>“You know they’re not ours,” Calian Thacher’s voice thundered from the kitchen, raw with something deeper than anger—something unraveling.</b>
<b>Irene’s stomach twisted. Her parents fought often, but not like this. Not this raw. Not this cruel.</b>
<b>“How can you even say that?” Dakota Thacher’s voice cracked, thick with disbelief and something dangerously close to heartbreak. “They’re our children, Calian!”</b>
<b>“No.” A bitter, hollow chuckle left his lips, a sound that sent a chill down Irene’s spine. “You keep lying to yourself, but you know the truth as well as I do. Jericho—he doesn’t mean us harm. But her.” His voice dipped into something almost reverent, as if he were speaking about something sacred and sinister all at once. “She’s not a child. She’s not ours. She’s an omen of complete darkness.”</b>
<b>Irene’s breath hitched.</b>
<b>She didn’t understand.</b>
<b>She was eight years old. She was just a girl who played dress-up in her mother’s old scarves, who liked to press her hands against the cold glass of the greenhouse to watch the flowers bloom in the frost. How could she be something terrible?</b>
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<b>“Do you even hear yourself?” Dakota’s voice wavered between rage and despair, her fury barely holding together the sharp edges of her grief. “Can’t you see how much you’re hurting your own family?”</b>
<b>Calian’s expression twisted into something unreadable. “You refuse to see it. She carries something inside of her. Something unnatural. I feel it when she looks at me, when she—” He exhaled sharply, shaking his head as if trying to rid himself of the thoughts consuming him. “She doesn’t belong to us. She never did.”</b>
<b>Dakota’s breath came in ragged gasps, her chest rising and falling like she had just run a marathon, her hands trembling as she gripped the counter. Then, without another word, she turned on her heel and stormed out of the kitchen, out of the house, slamming the door so hard the walls shook.</b>
<b>And then, silence.</b>
<b>Irene sat frozen on the couch, her legs tucked under her, her heart pounding so loudly she swore it would crack her ribs.</b>
<b>She had spent years wondering why.</b>
<b>Why her father—the man who had once lifted her onto his shoulders and made her feel like she could touch the stars—now looked at her like she was something cursed. Like she was something to be feared.</b>
<b>Why the warmth in his eyes had turned to cold, biting hatred.</b>
<b>Why, sometimes, when he looked at her, it wasn’t just anger—it was terror.</b>
<b>She didn’t know then what he saw when he looked at her.</b>
<b>But even at eight years old, sitting there in the dark, Irene knew one thing for certain.</b>
<b>He didn’t see his daughter. </b>