The world inside Onyx had dissolved into a haze of sound and shadow — bass thundering like a second heartbeat, lights bleeding red and gold across bodies that moved without faces.
I'd lost count of how many glasses of whiskey I'd had. Each one scorched down my throat like penance, a futile attempt to cauterize the wound inside me. But the memories didn't burn away. They clawed back to life behind my eyelids — the cold iron of the balcony railing, the taste of fear as gravity tore me down, the sound of Liam's voice when he chose her.
It wasn't recollection. It was invasion.
I sat slumped in a corner booth, the glass pressed to my forehead, condensation slick against my skin. The poise of the Sterling heiress was gone — stripped down to the raw, broken thing beneath. The woman who had once died, and was now being forced to remember every reason why, and was reliving the pain. The pain that I had so carefully tucked into a corner of my mind.
Through the haze, a ripple in the dark caught my attention.
Kaelen.
He stood apart from the throng, a sharp silhouette framed by strobes of light. Watching. Unmoving. His face was unreadable, but that gaze — calm, assessing, unflinching — was a weight I could feel on my skin.
He took a step forward, then stilled. His eyes weren't on my face. They had fixed on my hand.
I followed his gaze. My left hand rested on the table, my thumb moving in an unconscious rhythm — rubbing the pad of my index finger, back and forth, back and forth — the old nervous tic I hadn't done since before my death.
I didn't understand the fascination with my hands, but I closed my eyes and leaned backwards as a rush of dizziness washed over me.
I could hear the thuds of his shows as he neared, not with urgency, but with the deliberate stillness of someone approaching a live wire. When he slid into the seat across from me, the air itself seemed to shift — quieter, sharper. The bottle of whiskey sat between us like an offering.
For once, he didn't speak right away. His gaze lingered, not on my body, but on my exhaustion — the cracks beneath the armor.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low, uncharacteristically gentle.
"Have you been to Lake Estermont?"
The sound of it sliced through the fog in my head. I said nothing. The lump in my throat was too heavy for words.
"Used to. When my mother was still alive." The memory of my mother flashes across my mind, bringing new tears to my eyes.
"Over ten years ago?"
The club seemed to fade — the lights, the crowd, the pounding music — all dissolved as his voice painted another night entirely.
I opened my eyes and looked at him. "I guess so. Where are you going with this?"
"Over ten years ago. At Lake Estermont. I was seventeen. Hunted. My family's rivals thought killing me was a neat solution to a business problem. I was bleeding out by the lake, hiding in the underbrush, waiting to die."
The words pulled something loose in me. A flash of pine trees. The smell of wet earth. A memory I hadn't touched in years.
"A little girl found me," he continued. "She was playing hide-and-seek. She wasn't scared. Just curious. I told her to go away. She didn't listen. She just frowned and asked why I was frowning."
My heart stuttered.
"My voice was gone from thirst and pain. She noticed. Disappeared without a word. I thought she'd betray me. But she came back."
He paused, eyes glinting in the low light.
"She brought a tiny bottle of water. The kind served with finger food. She handed it to me. Didn't ask who I was. Didn't ask why I was bleeding. She just sat beside me, rubbing her thumb over her finger like this…"
His gaze dropped to my hand.
The world tilted. I could feel the weight of that old summer air again — the chirp of crickets, the cold plastic of the water bottle in my small hands, the secret I'd carried back to the lights of the party as if it were sacred.
My voice was a rasp.
"It was you?"
"It was you," he said quietly.
The words fell like a stone into my chest, rippling outward until the room seemed to shrink around us.
He rose then, slow and deliberate, the light cutting across the sharp planes of his face.
"Funny how fate works," he murmured, but his tone had changed. The clinical observer was gone, replaced by a man grappling with a fundamental shift in reality. The girl from the lake was a cherished, abstract memory. The young lady drowning in whiskey before him was a shocking, concrete truth.
He didn't leave. Instead, he sat back down, his gaze searching mine with a new, unsettling intensity. "What is this really about, Elara?" he asked, his voice low. "What are you trying to burn away?"
The directness, coupled with the whiskey and the seismic revelation, shattered my last defenses. A bitter, broken laugh escaped me. "What isn't it about?" I slurred, gesturing vaguely with my glass. "It's about… everything. The weight of it. The… the screaming in my head that won't stop."
I looked at him, my vision blurring. "You think you know pain, Kaelen? You think a knife wound is the worst of it? Try living with a ghost in your own skin."
He was silent, watching me, his expression unreadable. I could see him trying to piece it together. The celebrated heiress. The sudden, cold fury toward her soon-to-be fiancé. This raw, unhinged agony. His eyes flickered with a dawning, misguided understanding.
"Tonight," he said slowly, as if connecting the dots. "The foundation. The party. You publicly enshrined your mother just as another woman took her place in your home. That would… unsettle anyone."
He thought this was about my mother. He thought the ghost was grief. He had no idea the ghost was me.
I didn't correct him. I just let the tears fall, hot and silent this time. I was too tired to build another lie.
He reached out, his movements unusually hesitant, and gently pried the glass from my fingers. "Enough," he said, his voice rough. "This isn't the way."
"Give it back," I whispered, the words thick with despair. "It's the only thing that makes it quiet."
"No."
The single word was final. He placed the glass out of my reach. The loss of that small, burning comfort felt like the last straw. A sob wracked my body, and I leaned forward, my head in my hands, utterly defeated.
I felt his hand on my back, a warm, steady pressure through the silk of my dress. It wasn't a smooth, practiced gesture. It was awkward, as if he were unfamiliar with offering comfort. But it was real.
And it broke me completely.
The dam holding back a lifetime—no, two lifetimes—of pain shattered. "You don't understand," I choked out, the words tearing from a place of raw, unhealed agony. "It should have been me. It was me. I should have died that night. It would have been cleaner than this... this endless... pain."
I was barely coherent, lost in the memory of the fall, the impact, the betrayal that felt more real than the man sitting beside me. "I fell... I let my mother down.... and it never stops hurting..."
I was trembling uncontrollably, my breath coming in ragged, hysterical gasps. I was drowning, not in whiskey, but in the truth I could never speak.
"Elara." His voice was sharp, a command, but it was lost in the storm of my grief.
"I should have died," I sobbed, the words a broken mantra. "I should have—"
He moved with a sudden, decisive swiftness. One hand cupped the back of my head, his fingers tangling in my hair, not with passion, but with an almost fierce urgency. The other hand gripped my shoulder, holding me still.
And then his mouth was on mine.
It wasn't a kiss of desire. It was a silencing. A desperate, visceral attempt to pull me back from the edge of the abyss I was describing. To stop the words from coming out of my mouth. The words that he didn't want to hear.
It was hard and brief, a brand of pressure in the chaotic dark. The taste of salt from my tears, the faint, clean scent of him, the overwhelming presence of him—it was a circuit breaker.
And for a moment, the world was quiet.
He pulled back just as suddenly, his forehead resting against mine, our breath mingling in ragged sync. His eyes were wide, dark pools of his own shock at what he'd just done.
The hysterical sobs had stopped. I was left gasping, staring at him, the phantom pain of the fall momentarily stunned into silence by the shocking reality of his kiss.
Just as I was about to say something, a wave of dizziness hit me. And everything was dark after.