The words should have meant something. They didn’t. They were abstract, like a headline about a stranger.
I closed my eyes and saw him—not the man in the basement with the gun, but the one I’d known before. The first night Elise brought him to the club in Inverness. He’d worn a cable-knit jumper with a hole near the cuff that he kept touching, his nervous fingers worrying the loose threads. When I’d told him to kneel, his whole body had shuddered—in relief, I realized later. Relief at finally being told what to do.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he’d said, barely above a whisper. “I can’t stop wanting this. Wanting someone to—” He’d broken off, ashamed.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I’d told him. And I’d meant it.
He’d looked up at me then with so much hope it had made my chest hurt. Twenty-six years old. Hungry for structure. Desperate to be good for someone.
I’d made him good. For almost two years, I’d given him rules to follow and praise when he followed them. I’d watched him settle into himself, watched the anxiety bleed out of his shoulders, watched him learn to sleepthrough the night because he finally had someone holding the shape of his world in place.
And then I’d watched it turn.
It happened slowly. So slowly, I didn’t see it until the rot had already set in. James stopped having a life outside our dynamic. He quit seeing friends. Stopped talking about work except to say it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was me—earning my approval, anticipating my needs, being whatever I wanted before I knew I wanted it. His submission had been a gift. It became a void, bottomless and desperate, demanding to be filled.
Elise had changed too. She’d started wanting more than scenes—she wanted permanence. The title. The castle. She wanted me to marry her, to make her Lady Greymarch, to fold the three of us into a life that looked legitimate from the outside. “We could be so happy here,” she’d say, running her hand along the stone walls like she already owned them. “Don’t you want that? Don’t you want us to stay?”
I didn’t know how to tell her that what I’d offered was never meant to be a life. It was a container. A structure to hold them steady, not a promise of forever.
They kept asking for things I couldn’t give. James wanted to be the center of my world. Elise wanted a future I’d never offered. And I—I was disappearing for weeks at a time on missions I couldn’t explain, coming back hollowed out and silent, unable to be what they needed even when I was standing in front of them.
I should have ended it gently. Should have given them time, transition, and the aftercare that an ending deserves as much as any scene. Instead, I severed it. Completely. No warning. No explanation. Just get out and a closed door.
I remembered the way he’d looked at me after Elise’s funeral. I’d trained myself to feel nothing by then. And now, he was gone. His grief had hardened into obsession, and he’d chosen a bullet over living another day with what I’d done to him.
Soon, the pain would hit. The hot crush of it, the way grief had swallowed me whole when my mother died, then my father. I waited for guilt to settle onto my chest like a stone.
Neither did.
There was only a strange stillness behind my ribs. A quiet where grief should have been screaming. I pressed my palm flat against my sternum, half expecting to findthe wound had migrated—that the bullet had found my heart after all, and I hadn’t noticed.
But it was still beating. Steady and indifferent. As if James had never mattered at all.
Maybe that was the worst part. Maybe the emptiness was the grief—proof that I’d already buried him years ago, when I’d cut him out of my life and refused to look back.
I remembered the way he used to look at Elise. Like she was the sun and he was grateful to be warm. He’d loved her more than he’d ever loved me, and I’d known it from the start. I’d been the structure. She’d been his heart.
I’d broken them both.
The thought landed with a dull thud, and in its wake, a pattern emerged that I couldn’t unsee.
Elise and James were dead. My friendships survived—with Callen, Gus, Rafe, and even Snow—but the moment someone knelt for me and offered that particular kind of trust, it ended badly.
Oliver and Ophelia had both knelt. Both surrendered. Both trusted me.
“Kiernan?” Oliver’s voice sharpened. “What’s wrong? Should I call someone?”
When I shook my head, pains shot down my arm, and I let it ground me, let it push the panic down where it couldn’t show. “I’m fine.”
I wasn’t. I closed my eyes because I needed to hide. I couldn’t let them see what I knew with absolute certainty: I would destroy them too. It was only a matter of time.
Two more cyclesof waking and sleeping passed—enough for the fog to clear, for my mind to sharpen, for my voice to return to close to normal. The pain was still there and would be for weeks, but I could think through it now and force myself to do what needed to be done.
“Ophelia stepped out to find tea,” Oliver said from the chair where he sat by the window. He was scrolling through his phone, pretending not to watch me. We both knew the pretense for what it was.
This was my chance. I’d done this before—pushed people away when they got too close. One word was all it took.Go.
I opened my mouth to say it, and my throat locked. I tried again, forced breath through my vocal cords, and nothing came out. Not a sound.
