I don’t try to sit up.
Instead I slide sideways off the table and collapse onto the floor like my bones finally gave out.
And that’s when I break.
Not the way I broke before, not the way I screamed his name or confessed what happened, but something deeper and far more violent, like a dam finally rupturing. I curl on the cold metal floor as if I’m trying to fold inside myself, shoulders heaving, chest convulsing while tears pour so hard I can barely breathe around them.
I’m crying so violently that I can’t control the sounds coming out of me, my body jerking through hiccupping sobs while I choke on my own breath and grief. My ribs feel like they’re collapsing inward, my stomach spasming while my hands claw uselessly against the floor in search of something—anything—to hold on to.
It’s louder than anything I’ve ever allowed myself to feel.
Through it all, I hear Kai crouch beside me and feel his presence settle close, steady and quiet and cold in a way that almost feels kind. “Do you still want someone to punch you, pretty boy?”
I can’t even pretend anymore. “No,” I wail, my voice cracking apart as tears blur my vision and my mouth hangs open around a sob I can’t finish.
Kai nods, calm as ever. “Good.” He doesn’t touch me, doesn’t soothe or cradle or murmur reassurances, and he doesn’t brush a hand over my hair or my shoulder. He simply stays there, silent and present, letting the dam explode and letting me drown in the release of every buried truth, every secret I never wanted to speak, every horror I tried to bury under moans and muscle memory.
And for the first time since everything was taken from me, I let myself fall apart completely.
The sobs taper, but they don’t stop—not fully. They just wear themselves down into wrecked little gasps, like my lungs are still catching up with everything my body confessed. I’m slumped sideways on the floor, legs folded under me, arms limp at my sides, tears slickacross my cheeks and mouth and throat. I feel… empty. Hollowed out and stretched thin, like Kai opened my chest cavity and scraped me clean with gloved hands and soft, cutting questions.
My vision swims, everything hazy and salt-blurred, but I can still see Kai. Or the outline of him, anyway. Sitting down next to me without ceremony, back against the wall, one knee up, expression unreadable. Just… there. Not fixing. Not coddling. Just being.
I swallow hard before the question slips out, my voice barely more than a whisper as I ask, “Is Rafe coming back?”
The words sound small and frightened, like a child asking about a parent who promised they’d be home before dark, the kind of voice I haven’t heard from myself in years and thought I buried along with the cleaner version of me—the one who believed in locker room loyalty and forever.
Kai turns his head toward me, calm and unhurried, like he has known the answer since the moment I staggered into his container begging for ruin. He leans back against the wall and lets his head rest there while his voice drops low and certain.
“Of course he is. He’s just erasing your past.”
My body jolts at the words as my mouth falls open and I blink through the blur of tears, forcing my eyes to focus on him.
“What the fuck does that mean?” I wail, my voice rising again into something frantic and cracked as panic claws its way back up my throat. “What does thatmean?”
Kai looks at me then—really looks at me—and for the first time since he strapped me to the table and bled the truth out of me like venom, he smiles.
He shifts forward slowly, almost predatory, his thumb brushing under my lip where my tears have pooled before dragging gently along the corner of my mouth with a strange, quiet reverence. Then he lifts that same thumb and slips it into his own mouth, tasting the salt of my tears like it’s nothing, his eyes never leaving mine while the silence in the room tightens around us like a noose.
Kai leans closer, slow as smoke, that thumb still glistening from my tears while his lips part like he’s about to taste another secret, and when he speaks his voice drops even lower—dangerous and reverent—as he brings his mouth close to my ear.
“Think, pretty boy,” he whispers, and my skin prickles from the inside out. “What does Rafe do to people who hurt what’s his?”
The words detonate inside my skull like a buried landmine.
I flinch as my breath catches and my heart stops for one raw, ringing second before everything slams together in my mind at once—the puzzle clicking into place, the thread pulling tight, the answer roaring through my skull like fire.
Nathan.
Rafe is out there erasing him.
Erasing the ghost, the tape, the smirk, the filthy fingerprints Nathan left carved into my life.
My eyes go wide and my pupils blow open as a gasp locks in my throat so sharply it feels like a blade, and Kai watches me with that same calm, glass-sharp gaze, seeing the exact moment I understand.
The moment I realize where Rafe went—why he left, what he’s doing, and who he’s doing it to—I lurch upright, panic and shock and something dangerously close to awe colliding in my chest like a storm breaking loose.
“Wait—wait—you knew about Nathan?” I shriek, my voice going shrill and frayed as the realization tears through me.
