And still—it didn’t bring her back.
The worst part?
It wasn’t even Club Z’s doing. Not really.
It was mine.
Because I dragged her into this world.
I made her a target.
And the minute she wore my ring, she might as well have been marked for death.
The truth never heals.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, palms grinding into my face like I can scrub it away. But her ghost clings. It always clings. And it whispers the same warning I ignore every time Brooklyn tilts her chin at me, every time she looks at me like she hasn’t decided whether I’m salvation or damnation?—
You’ll kill her too.
The glass sits untouched now, the whiskey gone flat. I don’t need it tonight. The memories are enough.
I remember how she smelled—jasmine and cigarette smoke. I remember the little scar on her jaw from when she fell off her bike as a kid, the one she hated and I kissed a hundred times. I remember the way she’d look at me in bed, quiet, like she knew the storm I carried but wanted me, anyway.
And then—I remember the coffin.
Black wood.
Closed.
Because I couldn’t bear to let anyone else see her the way I last saw her.
I carried it myself.
Lowered it myself.
And I swore, as the dirt covered her, that no one would ever touch what was mine again.
That vow turned me into the man Brooklyn sees now.
Possessive. Controlling. Brutal.
I’m not proud of it.
But I don’t know how to be anything else.
And God help me—when I look at Brooklyn, I don’t want to be anything else.
She’ll never know what the ghosts carved out of me. She’ll never know the way I still wake up gasping for air, reaching for a body that isn’t there. She’ll never know how close I came to letting the entire empire burn to ash just to follow my wife into the grave.
But Brooklyn is different.
She drags me back.
She makes me want to live, even when I swore I never would again.
And that terrifies me more than the night she died.
Because if I lose Brooklyn the way I lost her—I won’t survive it twice.
