PROLOGUE
KELLAN
Some secrets are buried to protect the living. Others are buried because the truth would destroy everything still standing.
I used to tell myself mine was the first kind.
I'm not so sure anymore.
The most dangerous thing a man can do is love someone he was never supposed to protect.
The second most dangerous thing is knowing exactly what's coming and walking toward it anyway.
I've done both.
They say dead men tell no tales.
They're wrong.
Dead men tell the best ones. The difference is no one is listening until it's too late.
By the time you read this, you'll already know how my story ends. You'll have watched it happen and maybe you'll have grieved it or maybe you won't—maybe you'll have decided I deserved it. I've made peace with both outcomes. What I haven't made peace with is the things I never got to say, the truths I swallowed to keep other people breathing, and the one girl I failed so spectacularly that the memory of it follows me into every room I walk into like a second shadow.
This is my confession.
Not to God. Not to a priest behind a screen.
To her.
These meetings are getting reckless and I know it. I feel it in the way my hands stay too still when Masen talks to me now, the practiced calm of a man who has learned that the wrong micro-expression can cost him everything. I used to be good at reading people. Now I spend most of my energy making sure they can't read me.
Masen is circling.
He asks where I go at night with that studied casualness that fools everyone except the people who grew up watching him perform it. He's been doing it for weeks. Watching. Cataloguing. Building a picture from the fragments I've been careless enough to leave behind. I know better than this. But there is something about carrying this much alone that makes a man sloppy at the edges, and my edges have been fraying for months.
We were close once. Him, me and Caspian. The kind of close that felt impenetrable, forged in locker rooms and late nights and the specific loyalty that grows between young men who believe they are invincible. I believed it too, once. Before I found the files in my father’s office. Before I understood what Masen was. Before I realized the people I trusted most had been building something in the dark that none of us were ever supposed to survive long enough to talk about.
Some bonds don't break cleanly.
They rot from the inside, slow and silent, and by the time you notice that what you're standing on has turned to nothing, you're already falling.
I found out how deep Masen was in all of this a few weeks before the crash.
The same night I kissed Toren for the first time.
I've never said that out loud to anyone. I don't know why I'm saying it now except that the weight of keeping it in has become heavier than the weight of saying it, and I am so goddamn tired of carrying things alone. That kiss lives in me like a bruise that never quite healed, not painful exactly, just present. Always present. A constant reminder of the exact moment everything I had been trying to hold together began to come apart.
She is unlike anything I have ever known.
Fierce and soft in equal measure, loyal to her bones, and utterly devastating in a way she has never once been aware of. The kind of girl who walks into a room and recalibrates everything without meaning to. I thought distance would protect her. I thought cold shoulders and sharp words would make her stop looking at me like she could see through every wall I'd ever built. I thought if I made myself impossible to love she would stop trying.
I should have known better.
Toren Kellar has never in her life walked away from something she didn't understand and I was arrogant enough to believe I'd be the exception.
She wasn't the exception. She never was.
I loved being near her in a way I've never been able to explain to anyone, including myself. The feeling of her eyes finding me across a room was better than sunlight. Her attention, even briefly, even stolen in the spaces between everything else, was always the best part of my worst days. There are nights I replay it all and try to find the moment I could have chosen differently. The moment I could have taken her hand and told her the truth and chosen her over the deal and the silence and the slow suffocation of knowing too much.
