Page 97 of Cold Mercy

She steps closer, reaching out as if to touch my arm.

“This isn’t you, Thomas,” she whispers, shaking her head slowly. “You’re not this person. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know why you’re doing this, but—”

“This is who I am!” I interrupt, shouting now, desperation clawing at my throat. I step back, putting distance between us before her hand can reach me.

“I don’t know what you thought you saw, but it was a lie! It was your own projection, Sophia. You invented a version of me that doesn't exist just to make your life easier. You built an illusion because you didn't want to be alone. That’s on you, not me.”

I am cutting her open. I am watching the hope drain out of her face, and it feels like suicide. Please, just hate me, just give up.

She stops, and my words hang in the air between us, violent and final.

She wipes the tears from her face with the back of her hand, her movements slow, mechanical. She looks at me, really looks at me, searching for a trace of the man who held her last night.

“Then say it,” she says, her voice trembling but clear. “Tell me you feel nothing for me. Look me in the eyes and tell me that everything I feel when I’m with you is just in my fucked-up head.”

She steps closer, rain plastering her hair to her face, eyes wide and pleading for the final blow.

“Say it, and I’ll stop. I’ll leave you alone. I won’t call, I won’t text...just tell me the truth.”

It would’ve been easier if she screamed. If she hit me. But she looks at me like she’s giving me the knife and trusting me not to use it.

But Grace will be at her door in hours if I stay. I have to break her heart to save her life. I look straight into her eyes, and I let the mask slide into place.

“You’re right,” I say, hating the way her face falls before the words even finish leaving my mouth. “I don’t have feelings for you. Whatever you thought this was…it wasn’t real. You don’t matter to me.”

I am dead. I just killed the only good part of myself.

She stops breathing for a second. Her lips part, her eyes widen, and something in her expression closes forever. She’s not crying anymore; she looks like someone erased the ground under her feet, and she’s just now realizing she has nothing to stand on.

“Go home, Sophia,” I add, my voice scraping out of my throat like broken glass. “Let it go.”

My mind is calculating like a machine as I walk to the car. I told her I was leaving, but I didn't say how far. I'll watch her from a distance. I'll know when she comes home, when she leaves. I'll be her shadow. She's safer without me, but she will never be alone again.

The second I slide into the driver's seat, the machine fractures.

My hands start shaking so violently that I can barely turn the key in the ignition. Every instinct in me, the part of me that isn't a badge and a file number, is screaming. It’s roaring at me to run back, to pull her out of the rain, to erase the devastation I just carved into her face. The man in me is dying.

I force myself to drive away, and my eyes find her in the rearview mirror. I glimpse her one last time, standing alone in the rain, soaked, shaking, staring after me like she’s trying to understand how she misread everything so badly.

And the cruelest truth is, she misread nothing. She saw the man, not the monster.

CHAPTER 23

SOPHIA

Haven't I given enough?

The fire in the hearth is dying, the embers casting long, skeletal shadows against the walls of a house that has never felt more like a tomb. I'm sitting on the edge of the couch, my fingers curled around the neck of a whiskey bottle I didn't even bother to pour into a glass. I don't even like the taste of alcohol. It tastes disgusting; usually gives me a stomach ache, but it's always available.

I take a long, jagged swallow, feeling the liquid down my throat, and I realize with a sickening clarity that I am never anyone's priority. I've spent my whole life making other people the center of my world, rearranging my soul just into the cracks they left behind, but no one ever chose me back. For Thomas, I was just…a convenience. A place for him to stay for a while until he figured out what his ‘actual life’ was supposed to look like.

Pretty doll on a dusty shelf, go ahead and break yourself. You aren't the future, you aren't a wife, just a distraction from his real life.

I wish I had never laid eyes on him. I wish I hadn't been pathetic enough to fall for him. He just left too soon; I wasn't done. We had a thousand conversations left to have, a thousand moments I was stupid enough to think we were building. I can say that my messed-up head played another trick on me.

I take another sip, the bottle almost empty now.

Whoever you are up there, just take it away from me. God, devil, or fucking guardian angel. If I am not meant to be loved, just please take away my desire to want to be loved. I'm so tired of waiting. When is it going to be my turn? To be someone's first choice? To have a family that doesn't disintegrate?