Her heart slammed against her ribs like a drum of war. The moment her eyes flew open, sweat clung to her skin like ice, her breath sharp and shallow. The air was too quiet. Too clean. Her gaze darted wildly across the room, trying to anchor herself to something familiar—anything.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡO3pg5OgXT2
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But nothing was.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡk9K435yJvo
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The walls were sterile and white, the kind that didn’t echo memory. The sink in the corner was old, cracked at the base, and dripping with a slow, tired leak. A window let in slanted morning light, no bars across it. Just open glass and silence. No smoke. No gunfire. No blood on the floor.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHya9WtxRwp
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But her nightmare hadn’t gotten the memo; it still clung to her like a second skin. The screaming, the explosions, the bodies, limbs torn, eyes frozen in death. The heat of blood-soaked sand enveloped her. The stench of decay and metal. The eyes of those she couldn't save never ceased to haunt her, accuse her, and pursue her, even as she fled into the darkness of slumber.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0rQOYvqHos
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She buried her face in her hands. Fingers trembled. Her breathing wouldn't slow. Six months—that’s how long it had been since the Americans pulled her out of hell. Because she happened to be there at the right time, saving the right person, just in the right place. A human weapon that could no longer be ignored. She was a soldier born of fire and abandonment.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡj2YMtXkpSx
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She had spent over a decade in the dirt and blood of Africa or any country where they needed her to fight. A place where children weren’t raised—they were forged. She was seven when her parents tossed her into the hands of a mercenary commander. Seven years old, with a name, a face, and a body they never understood.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMJUtbGn9Us
She had been a disappointment from the moment she was born.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡhhBkTluhkK
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Born intersex. The doctors referred to her condition as true hermaphroditism, as if labeling her body would somehow make it more manageable. She had both ovarian and testicular tissue. A penis without a scrotum, a shallow vaginal canal. But that was biology. Her family didn’t see science—they saw a monster. A freak.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡdmEPLxWxm5
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A little girl with a soft voice, wide green eyes, delicate limbs, and a penis. Her very existence repulsed them. At first, they tried to pass her off as a boy, but her features were far too gentle: soft cheeks, long lashes, and a waist too curved.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7nalH2OHcC
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Then they tried to shape her into a girl, but skirts revealed too much. The bulge beneath the fabric was a constant reminder. A walking contradiction. Shame they could not disguise.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvgV5Qn8Vkp
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Doctors advised surgery—corrective, they called it. To shape her into one gender, complete the puzzle. But her family scoffed. Too expensive. Too inconvenient. Too much work for a child they never wanted. And so, at seven, they sold her. Sold her to a man who bought children to mold into killers.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡI5PJfDteRU
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No one would want her in a brothel; she wasn’t usable, they said. Not female enough for sex, too pretty for the battlefield. But in the end, she proved them all wrong. Because she didn’t die, she survived. No—she thrived.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPxCg3d8Z8E
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While other children wept or went insane, she adapted. Her hands learned to reload rifles faster than anyone in her unit. Her eyes memorized enemy patterns with frightening speed. Her limbs—graceful and slender—could twist around necks, press triggers, and wield knives. Her femininity became disarming. Her masculinity became terrifying.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSjlWEpo0Wo
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She was everything they feared. She rose to the top ranks before she hit puberty. By sixteen, she had completed over eighty black ops missions. She’d slit throats, planted bombs, and broken necks with bare hands. There was blood on her hands—so much that she sometimes wondered if it had replaced her fingerprints.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZwXwuhPNqq
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They’d called her the Black Witch—a name whispered in rebel camps and enemy bunkers. Beauty and death in one vessel. Her very presence made the enemies shiver.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWetn1LEVFi
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But now—this room, this quiet. This world of clean sheets and toothpaste and light switches. It was unnatural for her, a different kind of nightmare. One where she had to remember how to live.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4Mz3jOlAKD
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She sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees, heart pounding. Her body didn’t know how to rest. Her nerves itched for the weight of a blade, the familiar press of a firearm against her spine.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTtwesS2BzA
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By the time she reached her prime, she was a shadow among the living, swift, silent, and terrifyingly lethal. And that was when the American Army found her. She wasn’t supposed to help them. In fact, by every rule of her mercenary life, she should’ve slit their throats and sold their tags for ammunition. But she didn’t.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRv3cjbfvM8
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Something changed; maybe it was the way they bled and begged like children—untrained, unprepared, foolish in their heroism. Maybe it was the way they screamed for each other in a language she hadn't heard in over a decade. Or maybe it was the echo of something buried deep, a faint heartbeat under the steel armor of survival.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRkJ8pQQi71
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She intervened, with only a dull combat knife in her grip and her long, dust-covered braids flying behind her; she cut through the enemy like wind through wheat. Not a single gun fired from her hands—just the sound of steel splitting skin, of bodies hitting dirt. One after another, she ended them without hesitation, without blinking.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡO3cPpbePc7
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By the time the dust settled, the American soldiers were wide-eyed and shaking, pressed against the mud-soaked ground, staring at the figure that had just saved them from certain death. And then she spoke, "You, American?" And the soldier nods.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcckhyrobn3
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"Keep quiet," she said, her voice smooth, barely a whisper but heavy with authority. “Follow me.” The words were flawless. American English, sharp and true, without the strain of an accent. Their disbelief deepened.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡI8Cz6pXzWH
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“You speak English?” one of them asked, half-breathless, still gripping his rifle like a lifeline.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeUA7YwClvb
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She glanced back at them, eyes narrowed beneath the fabric of her headwrap. “I was born in Texas.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡApAGxsnLKH
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The words landed like thunder; they didn’t know what shocked them more, the brutal efficiency of her movements or the fact that in the middle of this hellhole, the woman rescuing them spoke with the cadence of home.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrc0l0CtJDa
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She led them through enemy terrain with the instinct of a predator and the care of a shepherd. Her knife never left her hand. Her eyes scanned every shadow. She guided them past the danger, across the broken hills and blood-drenched paths, until they reached a safe extraction point for their transport to pick them up.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVONC0042LC
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Only when the helicopter’s rotor blades began to scream in the distance did she finally turn to them. The captain of the unit, still recovering from the chaos, approached her with cautious reverence. “What’s your name?” he asked.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqou4dAJqWp
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She pulled her face covering down slowly. Dust clung to her skin, but beneath it, she was startling, a haunting kind of beautiful. Deep green eyes, high cheekbones, and a quiet storm behind her gaze.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZx28ZTLIFH
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“My name was Valentina,” she said softly. “But out here, they call me Eyodwa.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSY9KHnbbXj
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“Any meaning?” one of the soldiers murmured.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqtrg58fLwq
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“It means ‘one’ in the Zulu language,” she said, staring past them as if seeing ghosts. “Because I'm the first rank of their elite soldiers.” There was a silence. Heavy. Reverent. Almost afraid.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡs6cEUzCeDJ
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The captain looked at her differently now—not as an enemy, not even as a savior, but as a woman with a terrible story etched into her bones. "Tell me, why are you here?"13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡhy92HjVTNp
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“I was seven when they sold me,” she said, her voice low, barely audible over the thrum of wind and memory. “Twenty years of war. I don’t even remember what my mother looked like. My family didn’t report me missing. I was just… gone. And no one cared.” The captain swallowed, the grief and rage in her words cutting deeper than any knife.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡuYvRsIF5wP
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“I’m twenty-seven this year,” she added. “I counted my birthdays under stars while cleaning blood off my hands.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCkT8nUl4SX
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His hand reached out, almost on instinct—not for his weapon, but for hers. “Come back with us,” he said. “Let us take you home.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjSrnxzTTNf
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She stared at him for a long time. “This is the only life I know, sir.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFzE5rkcWJL
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“No,” he said quietly, “it’s just the only life you’ve been given. That’s different.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1h4QkEi90D
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And maybe that was all she needed to hear. Not pity. Not praise. Just someone who saw that she’d been denied something basic, something human. He gave her a choice: join them. Come back to the States. Try to find who she once was, if there was even a trace left.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsc3d7AnXKJ
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“If we find records of a girl who went missing… we’ll use that. Otherwise, we’ll make you someone new. You’ll have a name. A birthdate. A home. A future.” He said, and she nodded once, then followed the army into the helicopter, leaving.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4iMHbHYFfm
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Three hours later, military intelligence returned with a thin file. A missing person's report. Twenty years old, filed not by her parents but by a neighbor who’d noticed the child had vanished.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡqHHtiFTgNk
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Valentina Smith. Born in Austin, Texas. Brown hair. Green eyes. She was a quiet child, rarely displaying any smiles. The photos were old and blurry, but the features were there. The same slant of the eyes, the sharp nose, the sorrow already blooming at age six. She didn’t need a DNA test. That girl in the folder is her.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1PDztCHhAM
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“She’s coming back with us,” the captain said, and so she returned to America.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ69MviWHqGc
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Not with a parade. Not with celebration. But with silence and observation. They placed her in a secure base, isolated for evaluation, psychiatric assessments, and endless questions. They scanned her body, measured her strength, and studied her reflexes.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡhym3sK3jAg
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She had the raw, coiled power of a trained killer but the emotional expression of someone who had locked her soul away in a box and thrown away the key. She didn’t cry. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t speak unless spoken to.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5U3fNfCJxY
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Her face, flawless as it was, remained cold—her eyes unreadable. But when they brought her a dog, she flinched. When they played lullabies from her childhood, she left the room. They wanted her for combat, to be in the military, but the captain who brought her back said no.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡM0QN67E8GB
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“She’s done enough killing,” he told the brass. “Give her a life.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYvGXHoXyXs
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The army complied. Slowly. Reluctantly. They gave her space. Therapy. A new name, if she wanted it. Documents that made her real again. And for the first time in twenty years, Valentina stood in a world where no one expected her to survive gunfire. No one gave her a knife. No one asked her to kill.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzMrbH4tfjf
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Dr. Rebecca Haywood had been studying Valentina’s case for months—each scan, test, and lab result opening another chapter in what felt like a medical anomaly wrapped in human pain.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPGJufxz2G3
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It wasn’t just the science that intrigued her; it was the contradiction of the woman herself: a quiet storm of lethal calm, with eyes that had seen too much and emotions buried beneath decades of war and survival.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLienkBEvx7
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But today was different. Today, Rebecca had the final results in hand. She glanced over the pages—confirmed reports of true hermaphroditism, an incredibly rare condition where both ovarian and testicular tissues coexist in one body, fighting for dominance like opposing kingdoms forced into a truce.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOEi3k8d71N
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Valentina’s biology is, in every clinical sense, a paradox. Her penis was fully developed, functionally adult, though without a scrotum. Internally, she still had a small, underdeveloped vaginal canal, nearly non-functional.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡoxf2tbHSOU
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Her ovaries were partial, fragmented structures unable to produce viable eggs. Her testes—though present in tissue—produced sperm that were malformed, incapable of fertilization.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡueyOeHCPlS
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What made Valentina’s condition even more extraordinary wasn’t just the physical manifestation of both sex characteristics—it was the fact that her body functioned without any hormonal regulation, a medical impossibility for most intersex individuals.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZC8WrpxKBZ
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Dr. Rebecca Haywood had seen countless cases during her residency, studied intersex conditions in medical school, and even worked briefly on hormonal therapy protocols for gender dysphoria and true hermaphroditism. But Valentina shattered every baseline expectation.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCC52Yf00fk
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Most people born with true hermaphroditism—if they survived infancy or avoided early surgery—required rigorous hormone replacement therapy. The imbalance between estrogen and testosterone would often cause dangerous internal conflicts: organ failure, chronic fatigue, weakened bones, stunted development, or full metabolic collapse. But Valentina? She was perfect.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡacR1WM0DYu
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No injections. No suppressants. No enhancement. Her body had somehow developed an internal equilibrium—its own secret language of survival. Her testosterone levels fluctuated just enough to support muscle growth and physical resilience, while trace levels of estrogen stabilized her bone density and allowed for subtle feminine features—soft skin, full lips, and a waist that tapered despite years of combat training.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOoD0mMEuBl
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She was, in every way, biologically self-regulating. “You’re one in a million, Valentina,” Rebecca said, gently closing the file. She looked up, brows slightly raised. “Can you… get hard?”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡz5t4QNvafN
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Valentina stiffened slightly in her seat. Her fingers flexed in her lap, knuckles pale. She took a breath and exhaled through her nose, choosing to answer honestly despite the shame that often followed such confessions.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6cW1ts88Is
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“Yes,” she said quietly. “Every morning. Sometimes… when I have weird dreams.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFNhhuwp17c
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Rebecca tilted her head, sensing something deeper. “Weird how?”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHl8EeZHeyT
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There was a pause—long, weighted. Then Valentina’s cheeks, always pale under the harsh lights of the base clinic, turned a soft shade of rose. “With another woman,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “She touches me. Down there. And it feels… good.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrfHkZ97CUx
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For a brief second, her mask cracked. Vulnerability bled through, so fragile and unintentional it nearly startled Rebecca. It was the first time Valentina had reacted emotionally to anything in months.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOm41o0xVXi
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Rebecca leaned forward, her voice gentler now. “Tell me more, if you’re comfortable.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDOFuMWdiSD
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Valentina blinked slowly, the soldier returning behind her green eyes. “I don’t know how to explain it. The dream is always warm. She touches me like I’m human. Like I’m… not broken. And I feel things I don’t feel when I’m awake. Like I’m allowed to be soft.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡx7tXcTt1iv
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Rebecca nodded, her heart aching. “And men? Have you ever had dreams about them?”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPsNq6XMp19
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A sharp shake of the head. “No. Not even once. Not even when I tried to force it. Men, don’t touch me. They fear me, or they want to own me, use me. But I’ve always been stronger than them.” She said it with the blank calm of a woman who’d made peace with brutality. But underneath, something still trembled.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwkcvMoHLiZ
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Rebecca gently flipped to the fertility analysis. “Valentina… I have to tell you. You do have sperm. But they’re… biologically incomplete. Fragmented. Weak.” Valentina’s expression didn’t change.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxwtHhw2NWC
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“Your chances of impregnating someone are less than 0.5%,” Rebecca continued. “Statistically, it’s… nearly impossible.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9h4BHTM0Y9
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Valentina nodded, accepting it with the same grace she accepted every medical evaluation so far. No questions. No tears. “I figured,” she murmured. “My body doesn’t belong to any side. It was built to survive, not to create.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡoSUJB338im
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Rebecca closed the file but didn’t speak for a moment. There was so much unsaid in the silence between them—years of abuse, abandonment, war, and a life lived between the lines of gender and humanity.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeA3mGqz9sD
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Valentina was unlike anyone Rebecca had ever met, and for the first time in her career, she wasn’t sure whether she was treating a patient… or standing in awe of a living miracle.13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUtqF8Wahbh
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“You’re not broken,” she said softly. “You’re just… rare. Unwritten. But you’re whole, Valentina. More than most people ever are.”13Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmxt6VZkZWF
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