Make Them Regret It Chapter 27
Gia, Auntie doesn’t hurt anymore.
Then I remembered what my grandmother had said in my dream.
“See the world for us.”
That year, I was twenty-three.
At a cost to my health I didn’t yet fully understand, I had gotten back the Core I had lost and regained my dagger.
I didn’t know how much longer I would live.
But for every day I had left, I wanted to live for myself.
I didn’t want to be anyone’s daughter anymore. I didn’t want to be anyone’s fiancée. And I didn’t want to be Blythe Romano—the one who was always sensible, always yielding, always the one who stayed.
I wanted to see the sunsets in Florida and the heavy snows in Colorado, the places my grandmother had never seen.
I wanted to meet my mother’s family and give my grandmother a hug for her. I wanted to visit the cherry orchard my sister-in-law had told me about and brew a jar of wine with my own hands. I wanted to find a child Gia’s age and teach her how to write her name.
The roads they never got to walk, I would walk for them.
I didn’t need to wait for anyone to come for me.
And I would never again place my life in anyone else’s hands.
The wind picked up, and the dagger at my waist knocked softly against my side.
I looked back one last time.
The gates of Romano Manor were fading into the morning mist.
I had lived there for twenty years. There had been love and laughter there. Those things had been real.
But the goodness of the past was not enough to erase what came after.
I was done making excuses for them.
I turned my back and walked toward the sun.
After I had gone some distance, a black car was waiting at the crossroads ahead.
Colton was leaning against it, his hand outstretched.
In his palm were the shattered fragments of the pendant he had picked up from the ground, one by one.