Epilogue
Khai
A year later.
The weeks after I woke in the hospital have blurred into something indistinct, like a dream dissolving the moment you try to hold onto it. Days folded into nights. Conversations slipped through my fingers. There was too much to process, too much truth delivered in careful, clinical fragments.
The conclusion, they told me, was simple.
It was a dream.
The nightclub was real. The job before it. The gunfire. Seeing Emmy.
My Little Heaven.
Her hands pressed against my chest, slick with blood, trying desperately to keep me tethered to this world, that was real.
But the rest… the rest was my mind fracturing under trauma. A coma dream. Vivid. Immersive. Cruel. They said it was common, the brain building entire lives from fear and regret.
That was the part that hurt the most.
Because Ilivedit. I felt her. Heard her breathe. Loved her in a way that branded itself into my bones. Then I woke up and was told she had never been mine at all.
Emmy talked to me, every day whilst I was in a coma, she visited and talked to me. Telling me about her days. About my recovery. About everything. Somehow I heard her, processed the details. My name, Jaxons, Liams. Bed number 9.
Some nights, I wished I’d never opened my eyes.
Part of me wanted to slip back under, to return to that place where she existed, where I could make different choices, where the ending didn’t taste like ash. Where maybe we could have had a life after the blood and the fire.
But it wasn’t real.
Or so I was told.
In the days that followed, the truth unravelled slowly. Liam hadn’t died. His death had been staged, a necessary deception. He’d learned our father was planning to killme, not him. So, he disappeared instead, convincing our father that the wrong son was buried.
For nine years, he lived in the shadows.
Waiting.
Watching.
Preparing.
Jaxon helped him. Protected him. Covered the cracks. It made sense now, why Liam’s name was never spoken aloud, why grief around him always felt unfinished. Some part of me must have known too.
Because I dreamed of him coming back.
Even now, twelve months later, the weight of it still hasn’t settled. Some truths don’t land all at once. They seep in slowly, reshaping everything they touch.
My body healed slower than my mind. Weeks in hospital after waking. Endless tests. Physiotherapy. Learning how to move again without pain dragging me under.
And then there was Emmy.
She came to see me.
Again, and again.
She became my anchor, the reason I pushed through the pain, the reason I refused to let my body fail me. I never told her about the dream. Not at first. Some things felt too fragile to touch.
