The coffin never leaves me.
It’s always there, nailed shut, pressing on my chest when I try to breathe.
Her ghost lives in the silence between heartbeats. In the crack of gunfire. In the screech of tires on wet asphalt.
And then—Brooklyn.
She doesn’t know she’s walking through the graveyard of me. She doesn’t know that every time she laughs in my kitchen or tilts her chin in defiance, she’s brushing dust off a tombstone I swore no one would ever touch again.
The cruelest part is—sometimes I see them overlap.
Her dark hair spilled the same way. Her lips parted with the same stunned softness. Her eyes caught mine like they knew exactly what kind of man I am and chose me anyway.
The ghost hisses: You’ll kill her too.
But Brooklyn’s voice cuts sharper, realer.
“Dean.”
Just like that, the coffin cracks.
Not open. Not gone. But cracked enough for air to bleed through.
And I hate her for it.
I want to drag her down into the dirt with me, make her see the blood under my nails, the ruin in my chest. I want her to scream at me, run from me, hate me.
But she doesn’t.
She steps closer instead.
Always getting closer.
And God help me—when I imagine hands on her that aren’t mine, when I think about Rafe circling, watching, waiting—rage sears through me so hot it burns the ghost back into her coffin.
Brooklyn doesn’t belong in the ground.
She belongs here.
With me.
Breathing my air, wearing my mark, screaming my name until it’s the only language she remembers.
I rub my palms hard over my face, drag the weight of her ghost away and let the new one in.
Brooklyn’s ghost hasn’t even been born yet, and already I’m terrified of it.
I know one truth as sure as the dirt over that coffin—if I ever lose her, I won’t walk away this time.
I’ll follow her down.
Dean’s Control
She’s still shaking when I pin her wrists above her head against the fridge, her chest heaving, her mouth open on a sob she tries to swallow down.
I warned myself—again and again—not to break her. Not like this. Not with the rage still burning my veins from knowing Rafe touched her air, spoke into her ear, left his shadow crawling over her skin.
But then she looks at me with those wet eyes, broken and defiant all at once, and something in me snaps so violently I swear I hear the crack echo through my skull.
