Each room was emptier than the last. The walls mocked me. Her absence mocked me.
I ripped open folders, scattered papers, and dug through anything that might tell me where she’d gone. But it was all for nothing. All of it—fuckingnothing.
My rage simmered, boiling under my skin like acid. My heart thundered with such force it felt like it might burst. She was gone.
And for the first time in what felt like centuries, I wasn’t sure I’d get her back.
I refused to believe she’d truly left me. But a black, gnawing doubt began to claw its way into my thoughts—feral, relentless.
What if she had?
What if I’d lost her… for good?
I sank to the floor of the master bedroom. The fury drained from my limbs, replaced by a weight I couldn’t name. My fists clenched against the floorboards, the last fragments of wrath fading into numbness.
She had left me.
Not just walked away. No, she had drugged me and poisoned me. Slipped through my fingers with no trail, no scent, no goodbye.
And it obliterated me.
The floor pressed hard into my spine as I stared at the cracked ceiling. I felt every jolt of pain against my skin, but none compared to my ache. A hollow void had torn open where certainty once lived.
I had believed she worshipped me, that I was her god, her obsession, hereverything.
But now?
Now I was just a man.
Alone. Betrayed.
Forgotten.
She had sounded the death knell for us, and I hadn’t even heard it ringing.
I lay there for what felt like hours. Time unraveled around me—too slow, too fast, both simultaneously. My body ached, not from wounds, but from the brutal realization that I was no longer needed.
That she had walked away and never looked back.
Eventually, I groaned and rose, every movement a reminder that the world had shifted without me. The room around me was in shambles—just like my heart.
I moved like a ghost through the house, each step heavy, dragging through the rubble of everything we once were. Down the stairs. Across the floor. Toward the place where my final shame waited.
The dungeon.
When I reached the viewing portal of Malik’s cell, I froze.
He was still alive.
Tears stained his bruised face as he held Layla’s body, stiff and pale, in his arms.
My breath hitched.
He hadn’t let her go.
Even now, after everything… hestillheld her.
As I stared through the glass, an unwelcome stab of compassion pierced my chest like a pitchfork. Malik looked broken—truly broken—and for a moment, I understood. I knew that pain—that hollow ache of loving someone who left you behind.
