The word echoed.
I crouched slowly, hands shaking as I gathered the pages that had fluttered across the rooftop like dead leaves. A face stared back at me—frozen in time, smiling.
Liam.
My ex. The one who’d ghosted me after graduation without a word. I hadn’t seen him in years. I’d assumed he moved across the country, started over.
But stamped across the bottom of the page in harsh, black letters was a single word:
Deceased.
My pulse kicked up, fast and frantic. I reached for another paper.
Kayla Jensen.
My breath caught. Her? She’d been nothing more than a teenage nightmare—mean girl royalty who’d spread lies about me sophomore year. It was petty, stupid high school stuff. I hadn’t thought about her in forever.
But her picture was here. Alongside a dated police report. Cause of death: single-vehicle crash. Suspiciously redacted.
The paper nearly slipped from my fingers.
A chill crept into my chest, wrapping tight around my lungs.
“Tell me you didn’t do this,” I whispered, my voice barely audible above the wind. My eyes darted between Callista and Clint, searching for guilt, denial—anything.
But their silence wasn’t guilty.
It was expectant.
And that was when it hit me.
They didn’t do this.
He did.
Hades.
He was the constant. The common thread. The shadow always in the corner of the room.
And those people… the ones who’d hurt me, shamed me, made me cry in the dark when no one was watching?
They were gone.
Not just disappeared—erased.
Not random. Not coincidence.
Calculated.
For me.
Oh my…
He did it… for me.
My throat tightened, breath caught halfway between a sob and a scream. I dropped the pages like they burned. Because suddenly, they did.
He hadn’t just protected me.
