I Knelt For Three Years For A Lie. Now I’m Back For Blood Chapter 01
My best friend was pregnant. And the father was my boyfriend.
I didn’t stay to scream. I just packed a bag and left that same night.
The next morning, my brother Marcus caught up to me. His eyes were a mess of broken red veins.
“Owen and Jenna… they went out looking for you. Their car hit the guardrail on Ridge Road.” His voice shook. “The car was a furnace. We couldn’t even recover the remains.”
“And that baby Jenna was carrying? Mia. It was mine.”
I froze.
Suddenly, I was the girl who killed three people. The guilt didn’t just sit on me, it buried me alive.
I gave up everything. For three years, I crawled. I measured the distance to this shrine by how many times my forehead hit the dirt.
Every three steps—thud.
My forehead was a map of scabs that never got a chance to heal. My knees were just raw, weeping meat.
But I didn’t care. I needed the pain to be louder than the guilt in my head.
Until today. In the shrine’s corridor.
I saw them.
Owen and Jenna. Two people who were supposed to be ash.
They were wearing those expensive hiking jackets. They were laughing, picking out candy for a little boy.
The boy had Owen’s nose and Jenna’s eyes. He looked like a living taunt.
I started toward them, my legs shaking so hard I thought I’d collapse.
A hand grabbed my collar and yanked me into the shadows of an alley.
My brother Marcus. The man who’d supposedly lost his “true love.”
He looked at my face. My skin was peeling, sun-scorched, probably unrecognizable.
There wasn’t a flicker of pity in him.
Just… annoyance. Like I was a stain he was trying to hide.
“Don’t you dare go over there,” he hissed.
He slammed me against the wall, his hands heavy on my shoulders.
“If you hadn’t been so unrelenting back then, would they have had to forge those death certificates and run?”
“They’ve been living in fear for three years, Mia. They finally have a life. Don’t ruin it.”
I tried to speak, but my throat was a desert. All I could taste was the copper of my own cracked lips.
“It’s been three years,” he said, his voice softening into something cruel. “Just let it go.”
Just… Let it go?
The wind caught my lungs, and I started to laugh. It sounded like glass breaking in a bag.
So, those three years of me kneeling in the mud?
It was all a joke.
And I was the only clown in a play that had already ended.
…
“Mia, I’m begging you. Don’t wreck the peace they’ve finally found.”
Marcus pinned me there. The bricks were cold and rough, scraping against my thin cloak.
I forced the word out. “Peace?”
The word came out wrong. Dry. Jagged.
“I smashed my head against the ground every three steps from our front door to this shrine. I lived on scraps and slept in ditches.”
My voice caught, but I swallowed the blood back.
“While I was doing that… you four were just… playing house?”
Marcus’s eyes darted away for a second, then went cold again.
“You’re the one who insisted on this pilgrimage. I told you it was too much, but you wouldn’t listen.”
He reached out and straightened my hood with a terrifying casualness. Like he was fixing a crooked picture frame.
“Jenna’s morning sickness was severe back then. She couldn’t handle you acting like a martyr every day.”
“Owen just wanted her to be able to breathe. This was the only way.”
“Blame me if you want. I’m the one who got the fake IDs. I’m the one who found them this place.”
He said it so easily, like he’d just helped them move to a new apartment.
Then I heard it. The sound of a kid’s shoes hitting the pavement. Light and happy.
“Marcus? Did you get the water? Leo’s getting cranky.”
It’s Jenna. The same voice that used to tell me she’d always have my back.