Collins

Prologue

JOHNNIE

Am I bleeding?

I must be.

Everything hurts. It’s almost as though I’ve been split open, only to be stitched back together wrong. Warm and relentless, something trickles along my skin in slow, deliberate paths. Blood. It has to be blood. What else could feel this heavy? This…final?

Bright, violent, and merciless pain slices into me the moment my eyes crack open. Light pierces through me—blunt force to the bruises within, and I recoil, a broken sound escaping.

God, I’m going to be sick.

I lift my hand, sluggish and trembling, and press it to my cheek. Wet.

Of course it’s wet.

My fingers drag through the dampness, and I pull my hand back into view with a sense of dread—like I already know what I’ll see but I’m bracing for it anyway.

But it’s not red.

It’s clear.

The realization doesn’t land all at once. It unravels slowly, cruelly, as confusion coils tight in my chest. My brows pull together, my pulse stuttering as I stare at the sheen coating my skin.

Tears.

I’m…crying.

A broken sound threatens to crawl out of me, but dies somewhere deep in my lungs, suffocated by the weight of reality. I don’t remember starting. I don’t remember anything except the pain—and even that feels too big, too consuming to belong to a single moment. Unreal.

Then I hear it.

Faint at first. Distant.

A Blue Jay.

Its sharp, familiar cry cuts through the haze again. And again. Loud enough to remind me—

The world didn’t stop.

The sun is about to rise.

Somewhere beyond these walls, life is moving forward. People are waking, laughing, breathing.

Living.

And here I am.

Ruined.

Left behind in the wreckage.

This can’t be right…it can’t.

Because if the world is still turning…if the sun still rises after this—

Then what happened to me doesn’t matter at all.

I realize I have to leave. I have to run away from here, and never, ever come back.

And somehow, that hurts most of all.