Maybe it was always there, waiting for the right push.
Maybe it was Glory. She saw it. Recognized it for what it could become. And twisted it into something else entirely.
By fifteen, I was deep in it. I became the doe-eyed girl who thought she wanted Ruin. Convinced that what I felt was something real.
My gaze changed, losing that bitter edge of jealousy and softened into something else. Something warmer. Something dangerous. Adoration, maybe.
Now, when I recall those months, I realize the indisputable truth.
I was a fifteen-year-old girl who had lost the only parent she knew and was thrown into a world that never once tried to catch her when she stumbled.
I was already unmoored. So I clung to that feeling like it was something solid. Something mine.
I let it take root, all while Glory fed it. I started to build entire days around it. Around him. Around a version of Ruin that probably only existed in my head. A version that never existed outside of my need to believe in it.
And then that bubble of my delusion shattered by the menacing hand around my throat that made sure of the decimation.
The measured pressure that wasn’t meant to hurt—but instill panic.
The way my body froze. The way my voice broke into whimpers he ignored. The pleas that never really reached him.
That was Ruin. Not the one I had built. Not the one I had daydreamed about. But the real one.
At nineteen—after four years of orbiting him, of shaping pieces of my life around that illusion—I finally understood what loneliness actually meant.
Not just being alone but knowing you are.
I already knew hurt. My mother made sure of that.
I knew fear too. The kind that seeps into your bones from the men she surrounded herself with.
But everything else? Everything that followed? That was the gift that Wardens of Sin bestowed upon me.
If I’m being fair, therealRuin gave me something else too.
Hatred. And eventually, indifference.
But love? That’s where everything breaks. I can’t reconcile that word with him.
Not because it’s coming from him, really. Processing it means accepting something else entirely. That the man who once wrapped his hands around my throat—is the same man who inked those hands with restraint.
That the man who didn’t protect me—who chose the recklessness of club bylaws over due diligence, even hesitation—is the same one now trying to put my safety above everything else.
I’ve heard him more times than I can count. With Wolf. Ryder. Hound. Bulldog.
Shutting down plans that made perfect sense. Plans that would’ve otherwise worked but carried the slightest risk to me.
He argues. So does Wolf. They push back. Refuse. And choose to recalibrate instead. Like my safety is suddenly non-negotiable.
And that does something to me I don’t know how to process.
How could he be the same man? The man who is part of the reason I lost my peace in the first place. And yet—he’s also the only one who’s tried to rebuild it.
It’s seven in the morning, and I’m already reeling with these splintering thoughts with barely four hours of sleep.
It doesn’t help that they revolve around the one man I’ve been avoiding since coming back here.
Shit. Even that thought doesn’t give me the relief it should, because his stupid ass started to miraculously respect the boundaries I set.
