Miu's POV

Breathe, Miu.

But the command felt like a lie. 

My lungs had totally stopped functioning. The air around me turned to lead. Every breath I take was a jagged struggle, dragging in the cloying, funeral scent of those white lilies until I felt like I was being buried alive in her memory. 

My vision tunneled, the edges of the ballroom blurring into a dark, meaningless smear. The elite of Bangkok, the visionaries—they were all insignificant.

There was only her.

Seeing her wasn't like a homecoming; it was a head-on collision. My heart didn't just hammer; it panicked, a frantic, desperate bird slamming itself against the bars of my ribs until I felt bruised from the inside out. 

I felt a violent surge of nausea, a physical rejection of the reality standing on those stairs. It was too much. The texture of her dress, the lethal grace of her silhouette, the way she commanded the very molecules of the room....it was a sensory assault that made my skin itch with a terrifying, familiar electricity.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to turn and sprint until my lungs burned and the city lights swallowed me whole. But more than that, I felt a treacherous, sickening ache of longing that made my knees weak. 

How could I hate her for what she did and still want to run into her arms?

Lena took the stand at the base of the staircase, the microphone catching the glint of the chandelier. She looked magnificent. She looked like the goddess of a religion I had tried to pray from. 

She began to speak, her voice amplified, echoing through the hall with that same effortless authority that used to make me tremble in every board meetings.

"Good evening," she began, her tone smooth and professional, a perfect tone of a hostess. "It has been a long journey from Frankfurt, but the foundations we lay tonight..."

I felt a violent shiver rip through me. That voice—cool, melodic, and terrifyingly precise, had been the soundtrack to my greatest triumphs and my most devastating ruins. 

The sound hit me like a bullet vibrating through the floorboards and settling deep in my marrow. It was her. 

Not the memory of her, not the distorted echo that had played on a loop in my nightmares for twelve months, but the actual, living resonance of Lena.

She was scanning the room as she spoke, the practiced gaze of a leader acknowledging her subjects. I stood paralyzed behind a pillar of lilies, Ginny's hand still a heavy, suspicious weight on my arm.

And then, it happened.

Her gaze swept past our section, then snapped back.

In the middle of a sentence about urban development, Lena Schuett—the woman who never stuttered, the woman who lived by the clock and the compass....completely froze.

The silence that followed was deafening. It wasn't the silence of a dramatic pause; it was the silence of a machine that had suddenly stripped its gears. 

Her hand, resting on the lectern, gripped the wood so hard her knuckles turned the same shade as her cream gown.

She didn't just see me. She absorbed me.

She stopped dead. The elite in the room began to murmur, heads turning to see what had paralyzed the most powerful woman in the building. For five agonizing seconds, the gala ceased to exist. There was no Ginny, no project, no Bangkok Landmark. 

There was only the girl in the black gown and the woman in white, staring at each other across a graveyard of lilies.

The silence stretched, thin and brittle, until I thought it would shatter the glass walls of the venue. Lena's knuckles were white against the dark wood of the lectern, her chest rising and falling in a way that was far too ragged for the woman who had taught me that emotion was a design flaw.

Then, she drew a breath—long, sharp, and audible through the open microphone.

She didn't look at the teleprompter. She didn't look at the board members. 

She leaned into the mic, her gaze boring into mine with such intensity that I felt the heat of it across the room.

"I had a speech prepared about urban density and the future of the Bangkok skyline," she said. Her voice was lower now, stripped of its rehearsed polish, vibrating with a raw, jagged edge that made my heart stutter. 

"But looking out into this room... I am reminded that even the most ambitious projects are nothing without the soul that was meant to inhabit them."

A collective murmur rippled through the elite crowd. They began to turn, following the laser-focus of her eyes, trying to find the target of the Director's sudden, unscripted vulnerability.

"I spent a year away, convinced that distance would provide the clarity I needed to fix what I had broken," she continued, her voice trembling just enough for me to hear it. "I was wrong. I thought I could manage the pieces from afar, but the only truth I found in Frankfurt was that my home isn't a city. It isn't a firm."

She leaned closer to the microphone, her eyes never leaving mine. 

It was as if the hundreds of people in the room had vanished, leaving only the two of us in a vacuum of white lilies.

"I am home," she whispered, the words carrying a weight that felt like a falling skyscraper. "And I am never leaving again. I have come back to finish what was started. I have come back to make things right, to rebuild every pillar, every beam, and every promise that I allowed to crumble."

The words didn't just hang in the air; they suffocated me. The composed facade I had tried to maintain shattered, not from sadness, but from a sudden, searing heat that rose from my chest to my throat.

How dare she?

The anger was sudden and violent, a sharp contrast to the numb panic I'd felt moments before. How could she just stand there, draped in cream and surrounded by her signature lilies, and say things like that like it was that easy? 

As if she could just fly back from Frankfurt, walk down a grand staircase, and make things right with a few poetic metaphors.

As if a year of silence, a year of ghosts, and a year of me trying to stitch my soul back together could be undone by her simply deciding to rebuild. 

You don't get to walk away from a demolition and then show up a year later expecting to be the lead architect of the reconstruction.

Lena didn't care about the polite applause that rippled through the hall. She didn't care about the board members waiting to shake her hand or the cameras flashing in the distance. To her, the room was empty of everyone but the woman in the black gown.

She moved forward, her cream silk dress whispering against the marble, a stark contrast to the dark shadows I had wrapped myself in. The crowd, satisfied with their dose of corporate inspiration, returned to their champagne and networking, leaving us in a bubble of suffocating silence.

She stopped right in front of me.

For a long, agonizing minute, we just stared. 

Up close, I could see the toll the year had taken. Her eyes were still sharp, but there was a fatigue behind them, hidden exhaustion that her makeup couldn't quite mask. I saw her throat bob as she took me in, her gaze tracing the line of my jaw, the slit of my dress, and finally, the silver scar on my arm. 

She looked like an architect assessing a masterpiece she thought had been lost in a fire, stunned to find it still standing.

I was doing the same. I was looking for the monster. I was looking for the woman who had kissed me and then deleted herself from my existence. My anger was a cold, hard knot in my stomach, keeping me upright when my knees wanted to fail.

The staring contest didn't end because one of us looked away. It broke because of a voice that had been silent for too long.

"Lalina."

The name was spoken with a familiar, sharp clarity. Lena's head snapped to the side, her eyes widening as if she were seeing a ghost. It was the first time I had ever seen her look genuinely blindsided.

Her gaze landed on Ginny, and the shock was so evident it was almost violent. Her breath hitched, her perfectly composed mask finally cracking down the center. She looked at Ginny, then back to me, then down to Ginny's hand which was still firmly, possessively wrapped around my forearm.

"Ginny?" Lena breathed, her voice barely a whisper, stripped of all that stage-managed authority.

"Hello, cousin," Ginny replied, her voice steady and sickeningly calm.

The sound of it sent a physical jolt through my system, more violent than any architectural collapse I'd ever studied. 

Cousin? 

The room began to tilt. The gold-leafed ceiling felt like it was descending, ready to crush me. My brain, usually so quick to find the logic in any structure, was spinning into a void.

Cousin? How? Ginny—the woman who had spent a week bringing me tulips, the woman who had made me feel like a priority, the woman I was finally starting to trust—was a Schuett?

"I... I need air," I choked out.

I didn't wait for a response. I turned and ran, the slit in my dress fluttering as I pushed through the sea of white lilies. 

They smelled like a funeral now. My funeral.

I burst through the glass doors leading to the balcony, the humid night air hitting me like a physical blow. I stumbled toward the stone railing, my hands gripping the cold edge so hard the silver of my rings bit into my skin.

My breath was shallow and fast—a frantic, rhythmic panting that made my chest ache. I had forgotten how to do it. I had forgotten how to pull oxygen into a body that had been so thoroughly betrayed. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard it again. Cousin.

I felt a warm hand touched my back.

I flinched, spinning around with a sharp intake of breath. It was Ginny.

She just stood there in her sharp tuxedo, silhouetted against the glowing skyline of the city she had helped me reclaim. She didn't offer a frantic explanation. 

Instead, she just stood there with a small, knowing smile—the kind an architect gives when they see a blueprint finally manifest into reality.

I stared at her, my chest still heaving, my mind a storm of "why" and "how."

"Miu," she said softly, her voice steady against the distant hum of the gala inside. She waited, watching me with a clinical patience until the tremors in my hands subsided just enough for me to stand upright.

She stepped a fraction closer, her eyes searching mine. "The woman you mentioned in the alley... the one who left you a few months back," she said, her tone almost conversational, yet razor-sharp. "It was her, wasn't it? It was my cousin, Lena."

It wasn't a question. It was a confirmation of a theory she had been testing since the moment she met me.

"I figured as much," Ginny continued, her voice light, almost airy, as if she weren't currently dismantling my entire reality. "The moment her eyes landed on you earlier and how you instantly stiffened, I could tell. There's a lot of history there, Miu. A lot of heavy, honest history."

I finally found my voice, though it felt like I was swallowing glass. "Ginny... how?" I managed to choke out. 

My mind was a frantic map, trying to find where the Schuett line intersected with the woman who had brought me coffee and tulips every morning. "How—?"

She held up a hand, interrupting me before the question could fully form. She knew exactly what I was asking. 

"We're cousins," she said simply. "My mother and her father are siblings. But don't mistake blood for bond, Miu. Lena and I didn't grow up together. We aren't close."

She turned slightly, looking out at the glittering lights of Bangkok with a detached sort of curiosity. "I just knew that my cousin was the golden child. Adored by everyone, the prodigy. She was always complicated, cold, and so incredibly focused. That's why our grandfather took such a liking to her. She was the perfect instrument for the Schuett legacy."

She paused, a small, almost bitter shadow crossing her face. "When Lena's family decided to move to Bangkok to expand the firm, I basically lost contact with her. She became a myth in the family. We moved in different circles, lived in different worlds."

She took a step closer, her silhouette cutting a sharp line against the Bangkok skyline. The cold, tone she'd used to describe the Schuett family legacy softened, replaced by that low, hummed intensity that had made me feel so safe just hours ago.

"I don't care about the history you shared with her, Miu," Ginny said, her voice dropping to a private, urgent level. "I don't care about the past, the broken promises, or whatever blueprints she tried to sketch over your heart. That's her past. It's not our present."

I looked at her, searching for a lie in her eyes, but all I found was a terrifyingly focused resolve.

"I intend to keep my promise to you," she continued, her hand reaching out, hovering just inches from mine on the stone railing. "I told you I wanted to get to know you. The real you. And that hasn't changed just because a past has decided to etch herself to the present."

She let out a short, dry laugh, one that sounded more like a challenge to the universe than a moment of levity. "I like you, Miu. I like the way you think, the way you build, and the way you've survived. I will do everything in my power to be the person you need right now. The one who stays. The one who is constant."

I felt a sudden, crushing weight in my chest, an emotional saturation point. Ginny's words were meant to be a lifeline, but right now, they felt like more tethering. 

More expectations. More Schuett-branded structural designs for a life I was still trying to own for myself.

"I... I can't do this," I whispered, shaking my head as I took a trembling step back from her. "I need to go home, Ginny."

"Of course," Ginny said instantly, her expression shifting back to that protective, ready-for-action mask. She reached into her tuxedo pocket for her phone. "The car is around the corner. Let's go."

I held up my hand, a sharp, silent wall between us. "No."

The word hung in the humid air, colder than the champagne inside. "I already called my driver. He's two minutes away."

Ginny's hand froze. "Miu, you're shaken. Let me at least—"

"I need to be alone, Ginny," I interrupted, my voice finally finding a sliver of strength. "I can't be near her. And knowing that the two of you..." I trailed off, unable to finish the thought. Every time I looked at Ginny's eyes now, I saw a refraction of Lena's ambition. I saw a family trait of taking what they wanted.

I didn't wait for her to argue. I turned and pushed through the glass doors, re-entering the lion's den of the gala.

My heart was a drum in my ears as I moved through the crowd. I felt exposed, my black silk gown no longer a shield but a target. 

My eyes darted frantically, scanning the clusters of executives and the edges of the ballroom, bracing for the impact of a cream-colored dress and a gaze that could pin me to the wall.

Where is she? Where is Lena?

I moved toward the grand exit, my breath hitching with every person who bore a passing resemblance to her. But as I reached the foyer, the oppressive weight of her presence seemed to lift. 

I scanned the area one last time, the stairs were empty, the lectern abandoned.

I exhaled a breath I didn't know I had been holding in, my shoulders finally dropping an inch. She wasn't there.

I leaned back against the leather seat, the cool air of the car finally beginning to dry the cold sweat on my skin. I watched the lights of the gala fade in the rearview mirror, a glittering world of Schuetts and their grand designs that I was finally, desperately, leaving behind.

"Krit," I said, my voice barely more than a whisper, but steady.

"Yes, Khun Miu? Back to the estate?"

I looked out at the city, the skyline blurred by the speed of the car. The estate felt like a cage tonight. My penthouse felt too modern, too hollow. I needed to go somewhere where the air was thick with the truth, even if that truth was painful. 

"No. Take me to the Old Town. The apartment on Phra Athit."

Krit hesitated for a fraction of a second, he knew that address. It was the place I had avoided like a plague for exactly three hundred and sixty-five days. Lena's old apartment. 

The place where the blueprints were messy, the wine was cheap, and the love was real.

The drive was silent. When we pulled up to the weathered, colonial-style building, the quiet of the old neighborhood felt like a physical relief. I climbed the stairs, my heels sounding like a death march in the narrow corridor. When I reached the door, my hand trembled as I reached into the hidden inner pocket of my evening bag.

I still had the key. I had never been able to throw it away, a jagged piece of metal that linked me to a life that no longer existed.

Click.

This wasn't just an apartment. It was the site of the most beautiful construction and the most violent demolition of my life.

I stood in the foyer, my breath hitching as the moonlight hit the floorboards. To my left, the kitchen island where Lena used to make me tea while we debated the little things. Straight ahead, the drafting table where we had spent nights tangled together over blueprints.

And then, my eyes fell on the spot near the hallway.

My skin prickled, the silver scar on my arm pulsing with a phantom heat. I could almost hear the echo of the glass shattering. I could see the shadow of Mak, his face twisted in a rage. 

I remembered the stinging pain, the blood blooming on my skin, and the way Lena had looked at me—not as a Director, but as a woman who had just realized her world was burning down around her.

This was our sanctuary and our battlefield. Every happy memory of her laughter was layered over the memory of that trauma, a complex pyramid of joy and pain that I had been trying to excavate for a year.

I stood in the center of the room for what felt like an eternity, a ghost haunting my own life. I let the memories wash over me.

I couldn't stay here anymore. The air was too thick with things that couldn't be undone.

I took a shaky breath, gathered the remnants of my pride, and walked back to the door. I pulled the door open, but the hallway wasn't empty.

Lena was standing right there.

I froze, the key still cold in my hand. She didn't look like the untouchable woman I'd seen at the gala. Her shoulders were slumped, her eyes red-rimmed, looking as though she had been standing in that dim corridor for the exact same amount of time I had been inside.

She was leaning against the opposite wall, her cream gown wrinkled, her presence a silent, heavy weight. When she looked up and saw me, the expression on her face was a violent collision of everything she had never said. 

It was a raw, jagged map of longing, hurt, and a desperate, unwavering love that made my heart ache with a familiar, treacherous rhythm.

She looked at me as if she were finally seeing the sun after a year in the dark. She didn't speak. She didn't have to. 

The silence between us was filled with every apology she hadn't sent, every night she had spent in Frankfurt staring at a compass, and every second of the year she had spent being haunted.

"Miu," she breathed, the name a broken vow.

The sound of my name on her lips sent a shiver down my spine. It vibrated through the narrow hallway, catching on the rough edges of my soul and tearing them open all over again. 

I didn't look at her. I couldn't. If I looked at her, I'd see the woman who used to hold me until the world made sense, and I couldn't afford to see her.

I tightened my grip on my bag, my jaw locking so hard it ached. I tried to move, to push past her into the safety of the corridor, to run toward the elevator and the city that didn't know our secrets. 

Every instinct screamed at me that talking to her, breathing the same recycled air as her, would finally be the thing that killed me.

But as I brushed past her shoulder, a hand shot out, cold, trembling, but firm.

Lena's fingers curled around my wrist, anchoring me to the spot. "Miu, please," she rasped, the word cracking in the middle. "Please... don't go. Not yet."

That was it.

I spun around, wrenching my arm back with a violence that shocked both of us. Every ounce of restraint I had meticulously built over the last twelve months—it all shattered.

"Don't go?" I screamed, the sound echoing off the peeling wallpaper of the hallway. I stepped into her space, my eyes wild and burning. "You're pleading with me not to go? You, Lena? The woman who walked out? The woman who left me bleeding while you flew across the world?"

I felt a sob of pure, undiluted rage clawing at my throat. 

I wanted to hit her; I wanted to hold her.

"You don't get to be the one who begs," I hissed, my voice dropping to a dangerous, jagged whisper. "You gave up that right the second you chose to decide what's best for me....what's best for us. You were the one who left, Lena. I was the one who stayed in the wreckage. So how dare you ask me to stay now?"

Lena didn't flinch. If anything, she leaned into the fury, her eyes filling with a devastating, silent grief as she watched the girl she had broken finally turn into a storm.

"Why?" I choked out, the word sounding like a plea and a curse all at once. "Why did you do it, Lena? Why did you leave me here? Why was it so easy for you to just walk away and leave me?"

I didn't wait for an answer. I couldn't. I reached out and shoved her, my palms slamming against the expensive cream edges of her dress. 

Then again. And again. I began to hit her chest—weak, frantic blows that were fueled by a year of being haunted.

"I hated you!" I screamed into the space between us. I punctuated every word with a strike. "I. Hated. You. For every morning I woke up expecting a text. For every time I saw a lily and felt like I couldn't breathe. For making me feel like I was not enough. That our love isn't enough."

Lena didn't move. She didn't try to block my hands or defend herself. She stood there like a statue of penance, her eyes never leaving mine, absorbing every blow and every ounce of my agony.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, her voice a fractured ruin. "Miu, I'm so sorry."

"Sorry doesn't fix what you've broken!" I shrieked, my voice finally cracking as my strength began to evaporate. My hits slowed, turning from strikes into desperate, clumsy pushes. "Sorry doesn't stop the nightmares! You left me! You left me with just a letter as if that would help ease the pain."

The last of my energy vanished as quickly as it had arrived. My legs turned to water, and the world began to tilt dangerously. The rage that had kept me upright was gone, leaving only a vast, terrifying emptiness.

I felt my body begin to collapse, my knees buckling toward the hardwood floor.

But I didn't hit the ground.

Before I could fall, two arms, strong, familiar, and trembling with a matching desperation, wrapped around me. Lena caught me, pulling me hard against her chest, her chin resting on the top of my head as she sank to the floor with me. 

She held me with a ferocity that suggested she would never let go again, even if the world burned down around us.

"I've got you," she murmured into my hair, her own tears finally spilling onto my skin. "I've got you, Miu. I'm not letting go. I'm right here."

I couldn't fight her anymore. I just buried my face in the curve of her neck and wept, the scent of vanilla finally, cruelly, bringing me home.

I stayed there, anchored by her arms, my face pressed into the crook of her neck. The silence of the hallway was heavy, broken only by the hitching of my breath and the frantic, unsteady thrum of her heart against mine. 

Even now, in the middle of this ruin, our heartbeats tried to synchronize. It was a cruel kind of muscle memory.

"Why now?" I whispered into her skin, my voice sounding small and hollowed out.

I pulled back just enough to look at her. Her eyes were dark, rimmed with a raw exhaustion that mirrored my own. 

"Why did you come back, Lena?" I asked, and this time my voice didn't shake. It was flat, exhausted. "After all this time. You chose tonight. You chose the moment I was finally starting to breathe again. When I was finally... finally moving on."

The word moving on seemed to cut through her. I saw her flinch as if I'd struck her again. Her hands, still gripping my shoulders, tightened for a fraction of a second before they began to tremble.

"Because I...I love you, Miu" she whispered, her voice jagged.

I let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sob, pulling back from her touch as if it burned. "Love?" I repeated, the word tasting like ash. "You're going to use that word now? After a year of silence?"

Lena's face went pale, her hands dropping to her lap as she sat there on the floor of our old hallway, looking utterly defeated. 

"If you loved me, Lena, you wouldn't have left," I said, my voice gaining a cold, steady edge that felt more dangerous than my screaming. "If you loved me, you wouldn't have let me wake up in a hospital room alone, wondering which of my flaws was big enough to make you vanish. If you loved me, you would've had an inch of respect and decency to talk things out with me and we both decide after."

I gestured vaguely to the room behind us, the place where my own brother had marked me.

"People who love each other don't use protection as an excuse to abandon the person they're protecting. They stay. They fight together. They build a wall against the world, not between each other."

I looked her dead in the eye, my tears finally drying into salt-streaks. "You didn't leave because you loved me, Lena. You left because that's what you do best."

The silence that followed was heavier than the screaming had been.

Lena just sat there on the cold floor, her back against the peeling wallpaper of the hallway we once called home. There was no defense. No structural counter-argument.

She looked at me with a vulnerability that was almost grotesque, like a building stripped down to its raw, skeletal rebar. 

She looked exhausted, her eyes tracing the lines of my face as if she were trying to memorize a map she had lost a long time ago.

She didn't utter a single word. She didn't try to explain. 

She just let my words hit her, let them sink in like poison, her hands resting limply in the folds of her cream silk gown. 

She looked like a woman who had realized that every word she'd ever spoken to me was a brick in a wall she hadn't meant to build.

I stood up, the movement feeling heavy and final. My legs were weak, but my mind was made up. I couldn't stay in this hallway, surrounded by the ghosts of a life that had been systematically dismantled. 

I was halfway out the door, the cool night air of the corridor already reaching for me, when her voice finally broke the silence.

"I am sorry, Miu," she said, the words catching in her throat but holding a weight they never had before. "I will spend the rest of my life proving that to you. I will spend every hour of every day making up for the silence I left you in."

I paused, my hand gripping the doorframe. I didn't turn around.

"But do not question if I love you," she continued, her voice gaining a sudden, fierce clarity. "You can hate me. You can scream at me. You can blame me for everything that broke because it is my fault. But don't you look at me and say you don't know how much I love you. You know it. You've always known it. It's the only thing in this world I've ever done right, even if I did it badly."

I felt a shiver run down my spine. 

"I'm back, Miu," she whispered, and I could hear her standing up behind me, the silk of her gown rustling against the wood. "And I am here to stay. For real this time. No more disappearing acts."

I finally turned my head, looking at her over my shoulder. She was standing tall now, the moonlight hitting the sharp angles of her face. She looked like an architect who had just found the one site she was willing to die for.

"I'm gonna get you back," she said, her eyes burning into mine with a quiet, lethal intensity. "I don't care how many walls you build. I don't care how much you push me away. I don't even care who I have to compete with—cousin or otherwise. I will get you back, Miu. Because a life without you isn't a life; it's just an empty hollow space of time and routine."