Perfect.Deadly.Mine.
I lunge before thought can catch up, fisting her hair and crashing my mouth to hers.The kiss isn’t soft.It’s teeth and heat and the desperate press of everything we nearly lost.She gasps into me, her body a live wire against mine.Nails digging through cotton like she wants to peel me open and climb inside.
She tastes of freedom.The end of a fight I never thought I’d win.Every fucked-up dream I ever had of coming home.
When I tear my mouth from hers, we're both wrecked, breathing hard, eyes burning, lips swollen with truth we haven’t said yet.
"Where to now?"she whispers.
I drag my thumb across her mouth, still tasting her there.
“Anywhere,” I rasp.“Anywhere we fucking want.As long as you’re mine to fuck, fight, and bleed for.”
Because in this moment, with the blood still drying on my skin, I finally get the one thing I never believed I was worthy of.
Her.
Every part of me is hers.Has been all these years.Will always be.Even if the world tries to rip her from my arms again, I’ll fucking burn it down before I ever let her go.
I turn the key.The engine roars to life, loud and furious, then slam my foot down hard, gravel spitting behind us.
It’s just me and her, and whatever the fuck comes next.
Because this is where it starts, my story, not his, not theirs.And I’ll bleed, burn, and fucking kill for it if I have to.Because I’m done being written out of my own ending.The one I’ve always deserved.
Epilogue
Matteo
Six Months Later
Somethingsneverchange.
Like the stars.
Still there when you’re flat on your back, staring up at a sky that couldn’t care less what you’ve done.Emery curls into my side, meant to be there, born to be the calm that quiets the storm in me.
It almost feels as if we’re seventeen again.
Just two kids in an empty field, pretending the chaos didn’t own us.Her fingers used to trace constellations across the sky like they were maps to something better—as if she could rewrite the universe just by reaching high enough.Rewrite us.
Now the world’s finally burning the way it always should’ve.
After the files dropped.After it went viral.
Every dirty secret my father ever buried was dragged screaming into the light.Politicians collapsed.Dirty cops were exposed.And every bastard who ever played God with our lives went down in a blaze of viral fucking justice.
My father’s name lit up the screen.The whole damn world saw what that blood cost.
I don’t know where he is now.And I don’t fucking care.
We made it out.
One brutal, hard-earned six months later, here we are.Lying beneath the same stars that once felt a million miles away.Only now, freedom isn’t a whispered dream.It’s real.For a moment anyway.
It’s breath that doesn’t taste of blood and fear.It’s skin-to-skin.It’s this.Us.
And fuck, it feels good.The kind of good that feels stolen from a future I never believed I’d be allowed to touch.
