I breathe in, letting his scent fill me. Something inside me flickers back to life, faint but fierce, and my bottom lip trembles between my teeth as a tear breaks free, sliding hot and mournful down my cheek.
That scent… It’smine. Something I’ve held so close, something I never believed I could have.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he whispers, guilt threading through his voice. A guilt that reaches far deeper than this moment.
“I don’t remember the last time you didn’t break into my house,” I murmur, bitterness slipping into my tone before I can stop it. I’m not even angry—but something inside me tilts the blade anyway, pushing my words into a sharp edge.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asks, uncertain for once.
“No.”
My gaze finally finds his face. Moonlight cuts across it, pale and cold, gliding over the exhaustion carved into his features. I can feel the weight he carries—see how it drags at him, pulling the life from his eyes.
Still, he waits. Patient. Unmoving. Waiting for my verdict.
If I didn’t want him here, I would’ve already caught him off guard and killed him.
But I let him watch.
I always have.
Even after all this time, that familiar thrill coils in me—the knowledge that he’s here, lurking in the shadows, waiting for me, watching me.
I’m afraid that feeling will never leave me.
“Ineedyou, Estella,” he says, his words unraveling the stillness between us. The sweetness of them strikes me like a blow. A sob claws up my throat, and though I try to swallow it down, a choked sound escapes anyway, making him shift closer, his dark eyes locked on mine. “You are the air I breathe. The beat of my heart. I can’t live without you.”
“You—” I start, the word tearing itself out of me. I slap my hands over my eyes, angrily smearing the tears away. “You betrayed me, Dante. You lied to me. And then you stalked me afterward.”
“And you shot me,” he says softly. “And stabbed me.”
He’s not wrong. My teeth catch my bottom lip again, desperation growing sharp and feral beneath my skin.
A part of me wants to slap him hard. But knowing him, the sick bastard would only enjoy it.
“You’re the one who met me in my shadows and held them without fear,” he continues, voice steady but trembling underneath. “You’re the one who saw a complete person where I only saw fragments. You’re the one who taught me love—the kind that gathers every twisted, jagged piece and treats them like something worth worship.”
I pause briefly, feeling the tenderness of his words fill the gaping cracks inside me. “And you don’t want me to have anything that isn’t you,” I say.
He nods, throat tight, owning the twisted truth that sparks something dangerous inside me. “No. I don’t,” he breathes. “And I never will. My obsession with you isn’t something I can kill. You’re carved too deeply into me, Estella. I can’t exist without you.”
I close my eyes, letting his confession coil around me. This man—who once painted my world in color and then ripped it all away—sits beside me again, restoring everything to the place where it began.
I’ll never find another like him. I don’t want to. Everything I understand about love is written in him.
“I feel so lonely without you,” I confess. “No matter how much time I spend trying to convince myself I don’t need you… It all circles back to the same place.”
He goes still because for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, I’m not pushing him away. I’m not running. I’m not burying myself in knives and poison and silence.
He moves an inch closer, and the bitter, defiant voice inside me finally goes quiet when his arms wrap around me. A warmth I’ve been starving for.
And then I break.
Slowly. Painfully. Completely.
He strips me of every last defense, peeling back the armor I built from anger and guilt, leaving me bare in his hands as I drown in the echo of his suffering. I don’t remember shifting closer; I only realize it the moment I’m suddenly buried deeper in his embrace, letting him hold me tight enough to keep the world from collapsing.
The pieces of us fall like shattered glass around the room, a waterfall of grief and longing as we cling to each other.
