They push him into the ambulance, and I scream his name so hard it rips through my throat like glass. But it doesn’t reach him. It doesn’t reach anything.
Because he’s not moving.
Because he might never move again.
Christian’s arms are around me again. “He’s still breathing,” he says, over and over into my hair.
But I don’t care about breath. I care about theboy. The boy who held fire in his hands and didn’t know how to let go of it. The boy who never got to be anything else.
He wastrying.
God, he wastrying.
I bury my face in my hands, choking on every breath. All the sound is fire and sirens and a heart breaking loud enough to rattle the earth.
Somewhere in the chaos, the ambulance drives away.
And Kai goes with it.
They take him from the wreckage, but something in me stays behind, still burning.
Kai
In the silence that followed
The world melts into an impossible green, and as it spreads through every corner of me. I can’t tell if I’m vanishing into madness, or if madness has always been that colour.
In that green I find a doorway, and when I cross the threshold, the world I had known flips soundlessly shut.
But it’s only when the heaviness from my back slips away that I finally understand. I’m walking for the first time.
Addie
Three Months Later
That was the last time I ever saw Kai Oren Steele.
They took him to the hospital that night—bloodied, unconscious, barely alive. He slipped into a coma within hours, and for a time, I believed we’d lost him for good. The doctors weren’t sure if he would wake.
Still, I came. Every day. I sat in those sterile waiting rooms that smelled like old coffee and antiseptic, with books I didn’t read and letters I would never get to send.
But Gabriel never let me see him.
He wouldn’t even look at me. Wouldn’t answer my calls, my messages. And when I tried to visit, he’d already left instructions at the front desk.Do not allow Adeline Ross upstairs.I remember the nurse’s face—she had been kind. Apologetic. Like she wished she could do more.
But there’s no winning against a grieving father.
So I waited. In the hallway. In the parking lot. Sometimes just in my car, watching the windows of Kai’s room flicker through the blinds, hoping to catch the silhouette of something, anything. But I never did.
And then, he was gone.
Three weeks after the crash, every news article, every headline, had been about him.
KAI STEELE DISAPPEARS FROM PRIVATE REHAB FACILITY
FROM PRODIGY TO PARIAH: THE TRAGIC FALL OF KAI STEELE
A GENIUS GONE MAD?
