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“Stay,” he murmurs against my skin. “For as long as you’ll let me keep you, please, I beg you: Stay.”
I stay. Of course I stay. How could I possibly leave after that?
We lie cuddled together in the wet, stained wreckage of the bed. My head rests on his chest, rising and falling with his breath, his heartbeat steady beneath my ear. His fingers comb through my hair in slow, hypnotic strokes.
After a while, I start to look around. I notice that, like the rest of the house, the walls are completely bare. There’s no trace of the woman who once lived here. Nothing except the bed itself.
Lukas follows my gaze. He seems to understand my unspoken question before I can even form the words.
“I had it all removed,” he explains. His fingers never stop their gentle motion through my hair. “Years ago. Everything except the bed.”
I prop myself up on my elbow to look at him. The moonlight through the dusty curtains catches the silver in his hair, the deep lines carved around his eyes. He looks older in this light. More vulnerable.
“Why did you keep it?”
His chest rises and falls beneath me. I’m sure he won’t answer—until he does.
“Because I needed to remember what it felt like to want to die.”
My breath catches.
“I’d lie here some nights and try to will my heart to stop,” he continues. His gaze is fixed on the ceiling, like he can’t bear to look at me while he says this. “For months after she was gone—years, even—I’d close my eyes and concentrate on the silence and beg whatever god might be listening to just let me go.”
He pulls back to look at my face and sighs. “I brought you here to exorcise her ghost. I wanted to prove to myself I could feel something again, but I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. I thought I’d freeze and I’d see her face instead of yours.”
His eyes search mine. Gray and silver and storm clouds, raining tears at the edges.
“But I didn’t,” he swears. “I sawyou, Rae. Only you. And for the first time in eighteen years, I want to live.”
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LUKAS
Apple Health Sleep Report
Lazarev, Lukas | 15–16 Dec 2025
Time Asleep:7h 42m
Quality:98%
Nightmares: 0
I have three thoughts when I wake before dawn with Rae still tangled in my arms.
First:This is a mistake.
Second, half a heartbeat later:I don’t give a fuck.
And third, much slower, more of a stunned realization than anything else:I slept through the night.
No nightmares raked their talons over me. I didn’t jolt awake at three in the morning, with images of the light fading from Elena’s eyes still ricocheting through my skull. My skin is mercifully free of cold sweat, my heart isn’t racing, and not oncedid I try to reach out for the gun I keep in a bedside drawer in my penthouse half a city away.
I simplyslept.Deep, dreamless, and whole.
Rae squirms against me in her sleep, murmuring something unintelligible. I look down. Her face is pressed into the hollow of my shoulder and her breath fans out warm and even against my skin. One of her legs is thrown across my hip. Her arm drapes across my chest like she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she doesn’t pin me down.
The urge to wake her is almost overwhelming. Fuck, how good it would feel to roll her onto her back and bury myself inside her again… I want to bite the curve of her shoulder until she cries out. I want to fill her over and over until my seed is dripping down her thighs and there’s no question of who she belongs to.
