Chapter 2
Roman
Darkness doesn’t feel like darkness when you’re in it.
It feels… warm. Soft. Like wading through the low tide in the sea as it dances around your ankles. Like falling asleep in the middle of winter, the cold lulls you into a lullaby only Jack Frost knows, and you know you’re not going to wake up, but that doesn’t feel like the worst thing in the world.
But even in the dark, I feel her hand.
I’m not sure if it’s real. It could be a memory, a dream, or something deeper. Something luring me to the other side.
But it’s there—fingers wrapped tight around mine. Not letting go.
Her voice slips through next. Distant. Warped. Like she’s underwater, or I am.
“Don’t you dare leave me, Roman.”
I want to answer her. I want to say her name, but my mouth doesn’t work here.
There’s only pain, and weight, and silence that hums like a static-filled radio station stuck between signals.
Words and sounds drift in and out.
“Pulse is weak.”
“BP dropping again. Get another unit ready.”
I think I’m supposed to die.
Not because I deserve to… Maybe I do. But because this… feels final somehow.
My body is wrecked.
My blood is mostly on the floor of her house. Another way I’ve ruined her… tainted the only place she’s ever felt safe.
My heart’s been a broken machine for years, but this might be the moment it finally gives up.
But then I see her.
Scarlett.
Not in front of me—inside me, like she lives in the marrow of my bones. In the memories I never let go of. In the corners of my mind, I thought I burned out years ago to survive.
She’s laughing… real… free. A day by the ocean. Her hair wet, feet in the water.
I stole her first kiss. A kiss she wanted to save for Crew, but I always was a selfish man when it came to her.
I wanted all of her firsts, but the only one I ever got was stolen. Robbed like I had any right to it.
I remember it all as clear as the sky that day.
I remember her.
And then it shifts.
Lottie.
I see her crying. Her mouth silenced by every cruel thing we done to her. I hear her screams like I was there in that room, as my father monologues about loyalty, love, and what it means to own something so completely it stops breathing on its own.
I see me standing by the door, too afraid to move. Too full of shame. Fear. Of rot. Trained just like he said… No longer human.
I see her face when I told her she was nothing.
I see her face when I locked her in a room, covered in chili, as her mouth opened as if she was going to speak for the first time in months.
I see her face when she opened that door tonight and saw me bleeding in front of her.
And somehow, after everything, she still held me.
Still whispered my name like it was worth something.
Still cried over me as if I deserved it after everything I’ve done to her.
After I told her, her dad was gone…
Maybe that’s why I fight.
Not because I’m strong. I’m not. I’m a coward with blood on his hands and sins stitched into every part of his past. But in that ambulance, I think I remembered what it felt like to be loved by her.
For just a second, and the sick part of me wants that again, even after everything I’ve done to her.
Even if I only get five more minutes.
Even if I die for it.
I claw my way through the dark. Through the sound of machines, and voices yelling over one another. Through the IVs and the unbearable pressure in my chest. I feel the needle in my neck. The tube in my throat. The hum of machines keeping time with a heart that doesn’t know if it wants to survive.
But I do.
I want to tell her everything.
I want to kill the man who made her afraid of love.
I want to see her again. To brush away the tears from her face as I hear her sniffles next to my unconscious body that’s barely hanging on.
I hear muffled voices.
A choked sob.
“We don’t know if he’ll make it. I’m sorry.”
Footsteps retreat.
I stay still.
Eyes closed.
Breathing slow.
Alive.
Barely.
The next time I hear a voice, it’s hers. Soft. Choked. The sound of someone trying not to cry, but failing anyway.
“I’m mad at you,” Lottie whispers. “I am. But I need you to wake up now, okay? I need you to open your eyes because you’re not dying here. Not without telling me everything. Not without an apology.”
A pause. A sniffle, and my barely beating heart thumps painfully inside of me.
“You don’t get to make me look at you like you’re human just to die. I get it, okay. You’re not the monster you made yourself out to be, but this isn’t the way to prove your humanity. You need to come back.”
I want to tell her I’m trying.
I want to reach out, take her hand, and promise her I won’t die—not until I’ve burned my father’s empire to the ground.
But the darkness calls to me like a siren’s call… and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to resist anymore.
The darkness curls tighter around me, seductive in its silence, but Lottie’s voice echoes louder than the quiet.
It slices through the weight pressing down on my chest. It claws at the corners of my consciousness like it’s trying to drag me back from the edge.
And for a moment, just a moment, it works.
Her pain is louder than my shame.
Her voice is an anchor in a sea that’s trying to drown me.
I remember her eyes—how they burned even when her lips didn’t move.
I remember how she looked at me like she saw straight through the rot to whatever broken thing still beat inside of me.
And I remember her smile. Not the forced one she wore like armor. The real one. The one I didn’t deserve but got to see anyway.
I think of her fingers tracing the scar on my wrist like she wasn’t afraid of it. Like it wasn’t a warning label.
She once said, “There’s beauty in things that survive.”
I didn’t believe her then.
But now?
Now I do, because she has survived. She’s been broken and silenced, driven to the brink, and has come back brighter and more beautiful than ever.
I want to believe that about myself.
My lungs ache.
My ribs feel like they’re breaking one by one.
But somewhere in the haze, in the thick of blood and pain, I feel her.
Lottie.
Sitting next to a dying man who doesn’t know how to ask for forgiveness without bleeding first.
Her hand finds mine. I can’t squeeze back, but I feel it. Feel her.
Warm. Steady. Alive.
How often did I get lost in my dreams, trying to feel the warmth of her skin again when we thought she was dead?
I hear the beep of the monitor again. Faint, but there.
I hear the shuffle of nurses coming back. Urgency in their voices. Hope? I can’t tell.
I float between now and then, between memory and pain, between her and the grave I dug with my own hands.
But her voice is still here when she shouldn’t be near someone as awful as me.
I wasn’t human.
“You said once you’d burn for me. Remember?” she whispers. “You and the others made a hell of a lot of promises before you decided you preferred me broken. Don’t leave me alone. Not again.”
Again.
It shatters something in me.
I’ve left her too many times. Locked in a room, in a war I made her fight alone, and every time I left her stuck in the silence of her own world, she created out of pain and survival.
I owe her more.
I fight.
For air.
For words.
For one more second with her.
My heart kicks in my chest… hard.
It hurts like hell. Like being shocked back to life.
A gasp tears from my throat. My eyes flutter.
White light stabs through the dark.
And then I see her.
Not a memory or a dream.
Lottie. Eyes rimmed with red, face pale, but real.
She gasps, too. Her hand clamps tighter around mine.
There’s a flurry of doctors and nurses.
The tube is removed.
The pain lingers… so does the darkness.
“Lottie.” I force past the raw ache in my throat.
A whisper.
A prayer.
A promise.