Then footsteps. Slow. Reluctant. Moving toward the door that would take her away from me forever.
She paused at the threshold. "Gideon?"
I couldn't answer. Didn't trust my voice. Didn't trust anything except the certainty that if I spoke, I'd beg her to stay.
The door clicked shut.
Soft.
Final.
Devastating.
And I finally breathed?—
—except the sound came out closer to a sob than air.
The moment her footsteps faded down the stairs, something inside me detonated.
I stood. Chest heaving. Broken hand screaming. Vision narrowing to a pinpoint of pure, crystallized rage that had nowhere to go except outward.
I grabbed the kitchen chair—solid oak, expensive, meaningless—and hurled it across the room.
It exploded against the wall. Wood splintered. The backrest shattered into jagged pieces that scattered across tile like shrapnel. The sound was catastrophic. Final. Exactly what the howling emptiness in my chest demanded.
Not enough.
Never enough.
I crossed to the dining table in three strides. Wrapped my good hand around the edge. The broken fingers dangled useless, screaming protest I didn't register. Didn't care about. Pain was nothing compared to the hole tearing through my ribs.
I flipped the table.
The crash was immense—plates shattering, cutlery clattering, glass exploding in crystalline fragments that caught the morning light and turned it vicious. Coffee mugs I'd bought for mornings we'd never share. Wine glasses for dinners that would never happen. All of it destroyed in one violent motion that still wasn't violent enough.
My broken hand throbbed—each heartbeat sending fresh agony radiating up my arm. Purple swelling pulsed beneath skin stretched too tight. The unnatural angles of my fingers screamed warnings my brain refused to process.
I punched the wall with the broken hand because some part of me needed the pain to match what was happening inside. Needed something physical and real and undeniable to anchor the formless destruction shredding through my chest.
The impact sent white-hot agony exploding through bone and tendon and nerve. Something cracked—maybe the wall, maybe my hand breaking worse, maybe my sanity finally giving up its last foothold. Blood bloomed across bruised knuckles. My vision whited out at the edges.
I welcomed it. Grabbed the lamp next. Crystal base, imported, purchased because Belle mentioned once that she loved how light refracted through cut glass. I threw it hard enough that it shattered against the fireplace mantle. Shards rained down like violent snow.
I kicked the cabinet door. Once. Twice. The third strike tore it clean off its hinges. It clattered across the floor, skidding to rest against the overturned table.
The bookshelf stood against the far wall—floor-to-ceiling, custom-built, filled with first editions I'd collected to impress a woman who'd never wanted my money. Only my honesty. Only the parts of myself I'd never learned how to give without destroying everything around them.
I shoved it.
Hard.
The whole structure teetered. Books tumbled. Shelves groaned. Then gravity won and the entire thing crashed forward in a deafening cascade of wood and paper and broken promises.
I stood there.
Chest heaving.
Surrounded by wreckage.
