Security footage showed him limping through the back exit of a facility just outside the city. No one stopped him. No one knows how he even made it to the door. One moment, he was there. The next, he wasn’t.
Some say he died not long after.
Some say he’s still out there somewhere, under a different name.
Some say he went mad andthendied.
As for me?
I like to believe that whichever ending was his, it was one where he was finally free.
Free from the eyes. Free from the noise. Free from the name.
But the truth is, no one knows. And something tells me no one ever will.
Kai Oren Steele was never heard from again.
They’ll write stories about him, but they’ll never tell the truth. They’ll paint him as a god or a devil, because no one dares to admit that he was just a boy who bled like the rest of us.
And Kai was never just a boy to them.
He was a legend. A prodigy. A name. A product.
They wanted him to be the tragedy they could romanticize. The myth they could own. The broken genius who burned too bright, too fast, and fell exactly how they expected him to.
But Kai wasn’t any of those things.
He wasn’t lightning in a bottle. He wasn’t poetry. He wasn’t some gilded thing meant to sit on a pedestal. Or in a cage.
Somewhere along the way I think those two things might have become the same thing.
He was just a boy.
An angry boy. A resentful boy. One with too many wounds and not enough places to put them. A boy who was told, over and over, that brilliance would save him, when all it ever did was isolate him.
But of course, no one will ever know that.
They won’t guess. They won’t care. To the world, Kai Steele was cruel in the way that only the extraordinary can afford to be.
But I know better.
Kai was cruel, yes, but he was also art. And people forgive art for being cruel.
He had the kind of beauty that made people forget the ruin underneath. The kind of brilliance that made people overlook the blood on his hands, the cracks in his voice, and the grief that lived just beneath his skin.
The truth was that Kai Steele was never built for the life they forced on him.
And I don’t know where he is now.
I don’t know if he’s alive, or dead, or something in between.
But I hope—god, Ihope—that wherever he is, he’s somewhere quiet.
Somewhere no one calls him genius. No one calls him a god. Or a golden boy.
Just Kai.
Just a boy.
