10. Bindi
TEN
BINDI
The door clicks shut behind him and I peek my head out of Jordyn’s bedroom, then quickly run to lock it. Only then can I finally exhale. But it’s not a relief—more like letting a wound air out that’s been festering under a bandage too long.
I sink to the floor, my back pressed against the door and my knees pulled up close to my chest. I shouldn’t be shaking. I shouldn’t be scared. My forehead drops to my knees and I take a few deep breaths.
His voice still hits that exact spot under my ribs where he used to live.
Despite the fact the look he gave me . .
. god, that look . Hitting me like a match to dry grass.
He’s always looked at me like that—with fire.
Like I’m the only thing in this world he never wants to let go of.
That look seeps into my bloodstream and gives me a high I didn’t realize I was needing.
But we were kids the last time he made me feel that way. Just stupid foster siblings with some fucked-up, twisted crush on one another that we never admitted out loud until it was too late. Now that same look gives me a destructive high that my body already wants more of.
What he doesn’t get is that night broke me.
I had to learn how to survive on my own with nothing but a half-empty backpack and the weight of knowing I left him behind.
But I made something out of the wreckage.
A life. A fucked-up, fragile, stitched-together mess of a life, but it’s mine.
And now he’s here, crawling back in like rot under the wallpaper, with the promise he made before I climbed out of the window.
I’ll always find you .
I was sixteen when I left him in that house—dead body on the floor. I turned twenty-one last month.
Five years. Five years of running, hiding, trying to pretend I could ever be normal. Five years of stealing and surviving and telling myself that if I kept my head down long enough, maybe the ghosts would stop chasing me.
They never did.
Cass is a ghost I can’t outrun.
I sit on the floor for what feels like hours while I swear I can still feel him. But this feeling, it isn’t love. It feels like gravity—like a black hole. Like all the pieces of me I’ve tried to build up keep turning toward him, whether I want them to or not.
Because here’s the worst part:
My body still fucking remembers him.
How the fuck does he still feel like home?
Even now. Even after everything. Even after he stood in this room and looked at me like he owned every inch of my skin. Even when every bone in my body is screaming danger, my pulse is saying yes.
I hate that.
I hate him.
I hate that I don’t hate him enough.
He touched me like he’d never forgotten how.
Like time hadn’t passed. Like he still had rights to my body because he once loved it better than anyone ever did.
I remember the way his hands shook as he held onto my face.
The way he pressed his lips against mine while he placed a backpack in my hands and told me to “Run, Binx.”
I left half of my soul in that house, and I think he’s still carrying it. Cass made me feel like I was more than a broken girl in a broken system. Like I was his entire universe. Like I mattered.
And that kind of love?
It doesn’t die.
It festers.
It waits.
It grows teeth.
He chose to not run with me. He chose prison. Violence. Obsession. The myth of us over the reality of me.
Part of me wants to be her again. The girl who believed in things—in promises. In Cassidy Reyes. In the kind of love that could survive fire and time and blood.
I stand slowly, my legs aching. My chest feels like I’ve been in a car crash and haven’t stopped moving yet. I need to leave, because nothing is safe when Cass is near.
Not my heart.
Not my mind.
Not my fucking life.
I whisper into the silence, “I’m not yours.” A breath. A pause. “Not anymore.”
But the lie sticks in my throat.