The CEO's Regret: You made me your lie, I become your Loss-Chapter 76: Hit by a truck

He didn’t try to dismiss the dream as ’just a nightmare.’ He held space for the terror. He sat with her in the dark, patiently waiting for the erratic thumping of her heart to match his own steady pulse. He knew that for Amara, the danger was rarely the external world, it was the internal belief that she was an inevitable catalyst for disaster.

"I am not going to let you burn," he whispered into the quiet, his voice filled with a fierce, protective warmth. "If your light is too bright, then I will be your shade. If the road is too steep, I will carry you. We are not rewriting the past, Amara. We are simply refusing to let it dictate the future."

As the panic finally receded, leaving her exhausted and raw, Amara clung to the permanence of his grip. For the first time in her life, the silence of the night wasn’t filled with the echoes of those she’d lost, but with the quiet, grounding promise of the man holding her.

–

The morning sky over the cemetery was a bruised, heavy grey, mirroring the jagged sorrow of the scene. Elara’s burial was a lonely and a hollow affair, the earth being shoveled over a woman whose life had been defined by sharp ambition and, ultimately, tragic isolation.

Shane Martins stood by the freshly turned soil, his shoulders hunched against the biting wind. Beside him, his mother, a woman with tired, compassionate eyes, clutched the arm of a trembling, inconsolable Seren.

"Seren, please," Shane pleaded, his voice thick with the desperation of a man trying to claim a daughter who didn’t want him. "I know this is hard. I know you’re scared. But you have me. I am your father."

Seren recoiled as if stung. Her eyes, wide and glassy with hysterical grief, searched the empty cemetery for a savior who would never come.

"No! You are not!" she shrieked, her voice cracking in the damp air. "I can’t stay in that... that house! Mummy promised! She told me I am a Creed. My father is Sebastian Creed. I am not poor!"

The cruelty of the child’s conditioning hit Shane like a physical blow. Elara had raised the girl to value status above everything, feeding her the lie that her worth was tethered to the Creed name.

Even in their final, desperate days of poverty, Elara had promised to fix their status, to drag them back into the light of luxury. Now, Elara was beneath the dirt, and the dream had died with her.

"Seren, listen to me," Shane’s mother stepped forward, her voice soft but firm, trying to cut through the girl’s panic. "Your mother is gone. You need to be safe."

But the reality of her loss had fractured something in Seren. She looked at the modest, worn clothes of the people before her, people she viewed as beneath her and the terror of her new reality eclipsed all reason.

"I’m not poor!" she screamed one last time, her voice a desperate, high-pitched plea to a world that was no longer listening.

Without warning, she wrenched her arm away from her grandmother and bolted. She sprinted toward the cemetery exit, her small, erratic footsteps taking her straight toward the main road bordering the property.

"Seren, stop!" Shane lunged after her, his heart hammering against his ribs.

He didn’t see the heavy freight truck thundering down the road until the roar of its engine drowned out the wind. The vehicle was massive, a relentless blur of steel and momentum, turning the corner with no view of the small, broken girl sprinting into its path.

Seren, blinded by tears and the suffocating weight of her own denial, didn’t even look up. She kept running, fueled by the delusion that she could outrun her fate.

Shane screamed, his voice raw, stretching his hand out into the empty space between them, the distance suddenly feeling like an unbridgeable chasm.

The air outside the cemetery was split by the screech of tires, a sound so violent it seemed to tear the very sky open.

Seren didn’t stop and kept running as fast as her little legs could carry her. She was a small, desperate blur of movement, her mind trapped in a loop of broken promises and the ghost of the luxury she believed was her birthright.

As she darted into the path of the massive freight truck, Shane lunged, his fingers grazing the fabric of her coat. It wasn’t enough.

The impact wasn’t loud; it was sickeningly muted, followed by the terrifying, heavy thud of metal against bone.

Shane collapsed to his knees, his scream tearing from his throat, raw and animalistic. His mother stood frozen, her hand over her mouth, the world descending into a chaotic blur of dust and screeching brakes.

The truck driver, face white with horror, scrambled from his cab, but time had already stopped. Seren lay small and still on the cold, unforgiving asphalt.

At the Pedro mansion, miles away, the morning was uncharacteristically bright. Amara was sitting on the terrace, a cup of untasted tea in her hands, her gaze fixed on the horizon.

She felt it before she heard a sound a sudden, sharp pressure in the center of her chest, like a wire pulling taut until it threatened to snap. She gasped, dropping her spoon against the saucer with a sharp clatter.

"Amara?"

Julian was at her side in an instant, his hands on her shoulders, his voice laced with instant alarm. "What is it? Are you hurting?"

Amara clutched her chest, her breathing shallow and ragged. She couldn’t explain the sensation, the feeling of a life-force suddenly being snuffed out, the cold echo of a child’s scream that wasn’t there but somehow hung in the air.

"Something is wrong," she whispered, her eyes wide, staring at the gate as if she could see through the miles of concrete and road. "Julian, it’s Seren I don’t know but I feel like something terrible has happened to her or she needs me, I use to have these feelings whenever she was in trouble in the past."

"Amara, you’re just stressed. You’re exhausted from everything," Julian soothed, though his own heart had begun to hammer in response to her terror. He knew her, he knew that her intuition was a blade, sharp and rarely wrong.

"No," she insisted, standing up, her legs wobbling. She didn’t care about the ring, or the breakfast, or the fragile peace they had fought so hard to reach the night before. "I can feel it. She was alone, Julian. I should have gone. I should have been there."

Her hands were shaking uncontrollably. She turned to him, her eyes pleading for him to understand the urgency of the phantom pain in her soul. "Please. Find out where Shane stays."

Julian looked at her, the woman who, even in her own darkest hour, could not turn her back on the child who had been taught to hate her. He saw the genuine, agonizing intuition in her eyes and made his choice. He didn’t argue. He didn’t ask her to be logical.

"Sure," he said, pulling his phone from his pocket to signal his assistant. "But we are going to find her, and we are going to fix this. Whatever it takes."

The air at the edge of the road was thick with the scent of burned rubber and the suffocating silence of a life suspended in the balance. Shane remained on his knees, his hands trembling violently as he reached out but stopped inches away from Seren’s small, unmoving form.

His mother, a woman who had spent a lifetime teaching the beauty of language, found herself utterly bereft of words. She stood paralyzed, her hands pressed against her mouth to suppress a sob that threatened to shatter her composure.

Shane’s face was a map of agony. He hadn’t just been reaching for a child; he had been reaching for redemption. He had promised his mother he would provide, that he would be the father Seren had been denied, but the brutal reality of the situation was unfolding in front of them.

"Is she... is she breathing?" Shane’s mother finally managed to gasp, her voice cracking.

Shane didn’t answer. He was watching the shallow, jagged rise and fall of Seren’s chest, a rhythm that felt like a ticking clock. He scrambled to his phone, his fingers slick with cold sweat, fumbling to dial emergency services while shouting for someone, anyone, to help.

The truck driver, a man named Mike, sat on the curb nearby, his face buried in his hands, his entire world tilting. He hadn’t seen her. He had been checking his mirrors, and in a heartbeat, a life had changed course forever.

Shane didn’t look at the driver. He didn’t care about fault or the mechanics of the accident. He hovered over Seren, desperately trying to remember the lessons he’d learned about not moving a victim of blunt force trauma.

"Seren, baby, please," he whispered, his tears falling onto the dark asphalt. "Open your eyes. You don’t have to be a Creed. You don’t have to be anything but just... you."

His mother sank to the pavement beside him, ignoring the grit and dirt. She began to chant a soft, rhythmic prayer, a sound that underscored the tragedy of a child who had been taught to chase ghosts of status until they led her right into the path of destruction.