Tears spill silently down my face, hot and unrelenting. There’s no sobbing. No breath left to cry with. Just the weight of what we went through—what they did to us—caught forever in pixels and shadows.
The world doesn’t feel real anymore.
But the horror is.
The truth is.
I’ve completely lost my train of thought. Everything I’ve prepared for, every instinct I’ve spent years sharpening, every survival reflex I’ve learned to rely on—it all slips through my fingers like sand. Gone. Useless in the face of this heartbreak. My mind, once quick and calculated, is now drowned in grief and fury, consumed by the weight of what I’ve just seen. The evidence of what was done to us is no longer trapped in my fractured memory or the shadows of my nightmares—it’s real, tangible, captured on a screen that still flickers faintly where I dropped it.
And because of that—because I’m too far gone to think, to react, to breathe properly—I don’t hear the door fly open.
I don’t hear it slam against the wall with enough force to rattle the picture frames.
It’s not until I feel the rush of air and the sudden pressure in the room shift that I snap my head up, blinking through the blur of tears and panic.
Rowen stands in the doorway.
His frame fills the space like a storm. Shoulders tense, fists clenched, jaw locked so tight I can see the muscle pulsing beneath his skin. His eyes are wild, frantic, scanning the room until they land on me. They flare with recognition the second they do. There’s no hesitation. No confusion. Just that sharp, bone-deep awareness that something’svery, very wrong.
He knows.
Somehow—whether it was Ronan waking long enough to choke out the truth or Rowen finally dragging the puzzle pieces together—he knows.
Maybe not everything. Not yet.
But enough.
Despite that, with all that tension in his body and all that fire burning behind his eyes, the only thing that comes out of his mouth is the dumbest fucking question imaginable.
“What are you doing in here?” Rowen’s voice cuts through the silence like a blade, but I don’t move.
I can’t.
Because that question is a ripple on the surface of a much deeper ocean—and we’re both about to drown in it.
There’s a lead weight lodged in the pit of my stomach, and it’s pressing upward like it’s trying to crush the air out of my lungs. I can barely breathe around it. It’s not pain exactly—though everything in me aches—but something heavier, more primal. Dread. The kind that coils low and tight and doesn’t let go. I can feel it spreading like poison, dulling my limbs,thickening the blood in my veins. My head is spinning, but one thought remains fixed, circling like a vulture: I need toknow. I need the truth. Because there’s a voice in my head, quiet but cruel, that keeps whispering the thing I can’t bear to believe. The thing I won’t let myself believe. Not until someone confirms it out loud. Until it’s real. Until itbreaksme.
Footsteps echo from the hallway—multiple sets, boots heavy against the floor. I can tell by the rhythm and the weight behind them. Emerson’s helping someone. I strain to listen, and my chest stutters with relief when I realize who it is. Ronan. He’s awake. He’swalking. Even though I’m bracing myself for an emotional war, some small part of me unspools at the confirmation that he’s still breathing. Still alive. That tiny, fragile thread of hope keeps me upright when I want to collapse.
But it doesn’t last.
Not with Rowen standing in front of me like a shadow that won’t move. He’s still frozen in the doorway, his chest heaving, breath sawing in and out as if he’s been sprinting—but it’s not from exertion. It’s fromshock. He hasn’t said a word since his dumb, meaningless question, and something inside me fractures at his silence.
I meet his eyes, and I don’t blink.
My voice, when it finally scrapes from my throat, is low and raw—hoarse from screaming without sound for far too long.
“Where is Reign, Rowen?” I whisper.
The words hang in the air between us, vibrating with fury and heartbreak, but he doesn’t answer. He just stares at me, lips parted slightly, like the weight of the question has knocked the wind out of him. His hands twitch at his sides like he wants to reach for me, but they fall just as quickly. He knows better. Knows I would never let him touch me. Not by choice.
Movement draws my attention, and when I glance past Rowen’s rigid frame, I see them—Emerson and Ronan—framed in the doorway like silent witnesses summoned to observe the moment everything falls apart. They hover there, just behind Rowen’s shoulder, like ghosts who stumbled into their own reckoning. Emerson’s eyes are wide, his mouth slightly open as if he’s forgotten how to breathe, let alone speak. His expression mirrors Rowen’s—a shell-shocked reflection of disbelief. They still think I’m a ghost. Still think they buried me in the wreckage of that night and never expected me to crawl out of the grave they dug with silence and violence. It’s written across their faces—the way their eyes flick over me like they don’t trust what they’re seeing. Like the truth is harder to accept than the lie they built to survive.
But Ronan…
Ronan is different.
His eyes lock onto mine, and for a split second, it’s like everything else falls away—the blood on my face, the bruises littering my body, the tension vibrating through the walls, even the fire in my voice that still echoes between us. His expressionisn’t one of shock. It’s something deeper. Fierce relief laced with raw pain, and a kind of desperate hunger that cuts deeper than anything Rowen ever laid across my skin. His body leans forward instinctively, as if it physically hurts him to be still. He’s braced against Emerson’s side, one arm slung across his shoulders for support, but I can see it in every muscle—if he had the strength, if he could stand on his own, he would shove Emerson aside and cross the room to reach me. To touch me. To hold me.