Those words drop like a stone somewhere deep, something in me shifting under the weight of it and refusing to settle back the way it should. My grip tightens around his hands without me meaning to.
“I thought I was going after the person who hired you,” he continues, the words coming faster now, as though they’ve been waiting too long to get out. “Because that’s who I blamed for your death. You and I aren’t so different when it comes to that because I needed someone to blame for something too. I spent four years with vengeance the only thing on my mind. It was all I focused on, all I cared about. I didn’t care about anything else but making them pay.”
My heart is going a million beats per minute because…fuck,I didn’t fucking know.
I was already feeling the guilt of hurting him for what he unknowingly did. But now? Now that I know he did it forme? I think maybe my heart is trying to beat out of my chest because I betrayed it by betrayinghim.
He didn’t move on, not like I fooled myself into believing thatIhad. He burned down everything around us trying to get back to something that was already gone. To me.
He lets out a broken, wet laugh and sniffs. “And when it was over…I had nothing left. It was just empty. Three years of it. Just…existing.”
My gaze drags over his face, taking in the cracks I didn’t put there, but may as well have. The exhaustion. The hollow parts that used to be fuller, brighter. He survived it, but it took something from him.
It took something from us both.
Because the worst part is that I understand exactly what that kind of empty feels like. I’ve been living in it, breathing it in, functioning through it. War, orders, blood, noise. Anything to fill the space where he used to be. And he did the same thing, just in a different direction.
This is what happens when you leave something unfinished. It doesn’t disappear. It rots. And he’s been living in that rot all this time because of me, because I died and let myself become something that couldn’t go back to him.
My thumb brushes against his wrist, a small, unconscious movement. Grounding, or maybe checking that he’s still here, still real.
Not another thing I lost.
Right here, right now, I make the most important decision of my life.
I will die forever before losing him again.
Holding his gaze with mine, I speak slowly. “You once askedme to run away with you.”
His breath hitches, and his eyes flicker. “I remember. I’ve thought about it every fucking day.”
I let go of one of his hands to place mine on the side of his neck with my thumb against his cheek. I stare so deep into his eyes that I feel as if I’m swimming in the green of them.
“I would follow you to the ends of the earth.”
“I would follow youto the ends of the earth.”
Those words crash into me and echo inside my skull, over and over like my brain can’t let them go, like it’s trying to carve them into bone so I don’t wake up and realize I imagined it.
My breath catches somewhere between a laugh and a sob that I don’t even try to control anymore. Tears slip down my face, stupid and relentless, but I don’t care. Not now. Not when he’s right here, saying things likethat.
Seven fucking years of wondering, of guessing, of replaying that moment in the basement like a broken fucking record and never knowing what he would’ve done if we’d had more time.
Now I know.
“You’re such an asshole,” I whisper, my voice wrecked.
There’s no other way to process the fact that he just handed me everything I’ve been trying not to want for seven years. He’s reminding me of what we lost, and I hate him for it. But he’s also telling me what we could possibly have now, and I…
Something in his expression changes, almost like a transition. I see a hint of the man Reese used to be, the one whodied on that basement floor.
“I’ve never kissed a man before.”
Thosewords slam into me like a second impact.
My lungs fail me completely because…I know that line. I know exactly where it came from, exactly when he said it, exactly what happened right after. It’s what replays in a loop in my head every damn day.
The basement. The holding room he kept me in. Me perched on his lap.
