Her name sits in my mouth like a prayer I shouldn’t dare speak.
Sweet on the tongue, bitter in the throat, dangerous in the belly where it settles and burns like whiskey.
A temptation that feels like blasphemy.
I kidnapped her three weeks ago—three weeks that feel like three centuries—and I haven’t been able to think straight since.
Haven’t been able to sleep without seeing her face behind my eyelids. Haven’t been able to focus on anything except the way she looked at me in that dirty bathroom light, hair a mess, mascara smudged, eyes bright with fury as she kicked at me, cursed at me, fought me with everything she had.
She should’ve been terrified. Should’ve been pliant. Should’ve been like every other mark I’ve ever grabbed—crying, begging, breaking down into something small and manageable.
Instead, she looked at me like I was the one who should be scared.
And maybe she was right.
I bow my head and press my fists to my forehead, squeezing my eyes shut as if darkness can quiet the noise in my skull.
It doesn’t.
It only sharpens it—turns the volume up instead of down, makes every memory louder.
Because all I can see is Xavier on that stretcher, pale as a corpse, unconscious, blood soaking through white gauze as they rushed him past me.
The fluorescent lights had caught in the wetness, made it gleam like something alive.
Like something still dying.
I remember the paramedic shoving me back when I tried to climb into the ambulance.
A flat palm against my chest, firm but not unkind.
I’d almost broken his wrist for it.
Would have, if Asher hadn’t been there—wrapping both arms around my chest, hauling me backward, choking me out against the SUV just to keep me from ripping those ambulance doors open with my bare hands.
The last thing I saw before the doors closed was Xavier’s arm hanging off the edge of the stretcher.
Limp. Cold-looking.
The silver signet ring on his finger slick with blood that should’ve never been spilled.
“Fuck,” I whisper, the word scraping out of me like glass. “Please… God… don’t do this.”
My voice sounds wrong in this sterile space.
Too loud. Too human. Too broken.
Catholic guilt is funny like that—no matter how far you run from it, no matter how many sins you stack like poker chips on a table you know you’re going to lose, when the world starts slipping through your fingers, you crawl right back to the kneeler.
You fold your hands like the nuns taught you. You bow your head like the priests demanded.
You beg like a child who still believes in miracles, even though you stopped believing in anything a long time ago.
I press my palms together until they tremble, until the tendons stand out white beneath my skin.
Hail Mary, full of grace…
But the prayer won’t come.
