Page 40 of A Memory Not Mine (Sanguis Amantium #1)

Chapter thirty-eight

Mira

I ran down the hall aimlessly. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew it had to be away from Baird.

As I turned down the winding staircase, I remembered the overstuffed chair in the living room and threw myself into it, curling up like something wounded.

I yanked the blanket around my shoulders, tight—too tight—but it felt like a shield, the only barrier between me and the cold unraveling of everything.

I couldn’t process it. Not really. I thought I could—that I was strong enough, curious enough, open-minded enough.

But the truth crashed over me like a rogue wave, dragging everything I believed into the undertow.

It felt like I’d wandered into some twisted dream, a half-lit world where nothing obeyed the rules anymore.

Not gravity, not time. Certainly not biology.

The air felt thinner. My skin tingled. Was I in shock?

I wanted to scream. Or laugh. Or run until the earth gave out beneath me.

A Victorian woman locked in a crumbling castle…

yes. That’s what I felt like—trapped in some ridiculous gothic tragedy where shadows had weight and nothing was quite alive or quite dead.

Disbelief, betrayal, grief—for Baird, for the world around me I thought I understood—each emotion fought for dominance.

His lies of omission ripped a hole that ran clean through me.

And yet, it wasn’t really the lies that undid me.

It was the foundation beneath them—my foundation.

Science, logic, natural law—his existence warped it all.

Was it a lie? Or was this a crack in the universe I’d never noticed before?

My heart was pounding too hard—thudding not just in my chest but in my throat, behind my eyes, rattling the cage of my ribs.

I was freezing. Bone-deep cold, like I’d been dropped in the middle of a blizzard with no coat, no skin.

My teeth chattered uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop shaking.

Tremors racked through me in waves, small and violent.

My fingers were numb. My lips, I realized, were trembling too.

I rocked back and forth without meaning to, a slow, rhythmic motion I couldn’t seem to stop. Catatonic. That was the word. Suspended in a state of not-quite-here. I couldn’t process. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t face the look I knew would be on Baird’s face—the guilt, the grief, the truth.

There was more he needed to say. I could feel it hanging in the air between us like vapor. And maybe I even needed to hear it in some distant, rational corner of my mind. But that part of me was unreachable right now. There was no space left in me to absorb another word.

His story had broken me. I felt small—helpless, like a child. It cracked my understanding of everything I thought I knew wide open and poured in something older, darker, unimaginable. By then, I had no tears left to give. I was empty—wrung out like a rag, hollowed by grief that wasn’t even mine.

But even in the state I was in, two truths refused to dislodge.

First, Baird Campbell— whatever he truly was now —carried a wound that would never close. He believed he was to blame for Agnes’s death, and I saw the love he still felt for her hollowing him from the inside out .

And the second, the one that terrified me more than anything else: I was falling for Baird Campbell. God help me.