My legs finally give out, the strength evaporating from my marrow, and I slide down the vanity until I’m sitting on the bathroom floor. I pull my knees to my chest, huddling there like I’m sixteen again and hiding from a storm I don’t have the words for yet. The tiles are cold, biting into my skin, and I welcome the pain. I need something sharp and real to cut through the fog of him.
He didn’t have the right.
That’s the part that hurts the most. That’s the part that makes me want to scream until my lungs fail.
He didn’t have the right to come back and rip open a wound I stitched closed with my own hands, one agonising thread at a time. He didn’t have the right to look at me like I was still his—like he owned the very blood in my veins—when I spent years convincing myself I belonged to no one. Least of all him.
I press my forehead to my knees and I cry.
Not pretty tears. Not cinematic, tear-stained-cheekbones-at-the-altar tears. These are ugly, silent, body-wracking sobs that make my shoulders jerk and my breath stutter like it’s catching on something jagged and rusted inside me.
“I didn’t deserve this,” I whisper into my own skin, my voice muffled by the silk. “I didn’t deserve you.”
Because that’s the truth I never let myself say in the daylight. It would’ve been easier if he’d forgotten me. Easier if I’d been insignificant, a footnote in his violent history. Easier if I’d been replaceable.
But him coming back means I mattered. And that terrifies me more than his absence ever did, because if I matter to a monster, then I’m already halfway to becoming one myself.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to find a dark corner in my mind, but the memories bleed in anyway—the low, dangerous rumble of his voice, the way he used to look at me like he saw straight through every lie I told myself, the way my name sounded different in his mouth. It wasn’t softer. It was sharper. Like a blade being drawn slowly across my throat.
I hate that part of myself. The part that Kai built.
I hate that my first instinct isn’t to run until my feet bleed. It’s why now? It’s what does he want? It’s what does this mean for the girl I’m pretending to be? I hate that my pulse spikes at the thought of him being this close, lurking in the shadows of the villa like a wolf in a garden. I hate that my fear is tangled with something darker, something traitorous and filthy, something that makes my stomach twist in on itself with a hunger that should be dead.
I don’t deserve him. I don’t deserve this wreckage.
I drag myself upright eventually, because collapsing won’t stop the gears of the machine he’s already set in motion. I move like I’m underwater—slow, heavy, every step deliberate as I go through the motions of getting ready for the man who thinks he’s my fiancé.
Dress. Hair. Makeup.
The motions are muscle memory—polished, controlled, the perfect, hollow version of me that Noah expects to see at his side. The version that passes for human.
But my mind is nowhere near this room. It’s in the jungle. It’s in the dark. It’s on the edge of something feral and inevitable.
He came back for you, a voice whispers in the back of my skull, sounding far too much like Kai.
No, I tell it viciously, my hands trembling as I fasten an earring. He came back to ruin me. To finish the job. I drop the other earring. It clatters to the floor with a sharp, metallic ring, and the sound makes me flinch like a gunshot.
Get it together. Get it together. Get it fucking together.I stare at myself one last time before leaving the bathroom.
I look fine. I look expensive. I look ready to be a bride.
That’s the most terrifying part.
Because underneath the silk and the composure and the expensive, curated calm, something old and dangerous is waking up—something I buried in a shallow grave because it was easier than admitting I still wanted it.
Still wanted him. Still wanted the destruction he brings.
Kai should have stayed a ghost.
Because now that he’s real again, I don’t know if I’m strong enough to survive the truth—the truth that every part of me has been waiting for him to come and take me back to the dark.
I open the door, and the air of the bedroom hits me like a physical barrier—colder, drier, and thick with the scent of Noah’s expensive cologne, which usually smells like success but tonight just smells like a cover-up.
He’s sitting in the armchair near the balcony, a glass of amber liquid in his hand, his silhouette framed by the encroaching black of the jungle outside. He doesn’t look up immediately. He just swirls the ice, the clink-clink-clink sounding like a countdown.
“You were in there a long time, Scarlett,” he says, his voice deceptively smooth, the way a lake looks right before something breaks the surface.
I don’t answer. I can’t. Every time I breathe, I feel the ghost of Kai’s fingers on my throat, the weight of him still heavy in my lower belly. I feel like a walking sin, a woman glazed in the sweat and shadows of a man who isn’t the one holding the ring.
