Chapter 36 #2
His lips twitch into something that might be a smile. “Because if I have to stand in this room for another minute pretending to enjoy small talk, I might set this entire place on fire.”
“And dancing is better?”
“With you, it might be.”
My heart stutters at that, and I hate that it does.
He offers a hand, and I stare at it for a second too long before finally placing mine in his.
He doesn’t pull me close, but his fingers close around mine. “Come on, Soreya,” he says, quieter this time.
At the sound of it, Christian’s head snaps up. He watches Kai now, with a sharp, sudden frown.
But I let Kai lead me anyway.
The music in the ballroom has shifted into something slower now. It follows us as Kai brings me to the edge of the room, just far enough from the crowd to feel separate, but close enough to still be seen. Always close enough to be seen.
He places a hand at my waist, light but certain. My palm finds his shoulder, and we start to move.
I study his face: the sharp cheekbones, the lashes darker than they should be. Up close, he looks the way he sounds lately: frayed.
Has he been sleeping?
I’m about to ask him if he’s okay. The words are already forming, pressing up against the back of my teeth.
“Don’t you think it’s funny,” he says, his voice quiet and close, just above the music, “how music with no words can still say more than most people ever manage with a thousand?”
I blink, caught off guard. “Yeah,” I murmur. “I guess it kind of forces you to feel it.”
He nods, his gaze fixed somewhere past my shoulder. “Some things are felt, not spoken.”
I let his words hang in the air between us. They’re soft. Simple. And yet… nothing about them is simple at all.
The strings swell in the background, the kind of sound that passes through your chest before you even notice it’s found its way in. And maybe that’s what he means. Maybe that’s what this is.
Feeling without saying.
He still isn’t looking at me.
“Is that why you don’t talk?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Why you avoid telling anyone how you’re actually doing?”
His gaze cuts to mine then, fast.
For a second, I think he’s going to walk away. That he’ll let go of my hand and vanish into the crowd. But he doesn’t.
Instead, he laughs. Quietly. “You really want to talk about feelings?” he asks, almost under his breath.
“I want to know if you’re okay,” I say.
He studies me now, really studies me, like he’s trying to decide what I’m really asking. “I’m not sure that matters,” he says eventually.
“It matters to me.”
That earns another flicker of something behind his eyes. Surprise, maybe.
Or guilt.
Maybe both.
He swallows once. Looks away. “That’s exactly the problem.”
I don’t know what makes me say it, maybe the look in his eyes, or maybe the way it hurts not knowing where I stand, but the words slip out before I can catch them.
“Look, I know you don’t feel the same way. I know you—”
His hand tightens around mine, enough to hurt. “Don’t,” he says sharply. His voice is low, rough. “Don’t finish that.”
I blink. “Why not?”
“You think I don’t feel this?” he snaps, and his voice breaks, his hand trembles. “You think I don’t know what this is?”
I stare up at him, stunned into silence.
“I do,” he says. “I just don’t know how to survive it.”
I don’t move. Can’t speak.
I just don’t know how to survive it.
I didn’t think anything could surprise me anymore when it came to Kai Oren Steele.
But this? This version of him? It leaves me wrecked.
He leans in then, and for one suspended second, I think he’s going to kiss me.
But he doesn’t.
He presses his lips to the top of my forehead. And it’s soft. Gentle.
Like an apology.
“I can’t afford to matter to you, Soreya,” he says quietly as he pulls back. And just like that, he steps away.
I follow. Just one step. Because I don’t understand. Because this doesn’t feel like the end, but it feels too much like goodbye.
“But why?” I ask, and it comes out more desperate than I mean it to. “Why, Kai? If it’s time you need, I’m willing to wait, if—”
“Please don’t.”
His voice slices clean through whatever hope was left hanging between us.
And this time, when he walks away, I don’t stop him.
But I see the way his hands curl into fists at his sides. The way he doesn’t look back, even once.
And I wonder, just for a moment, if someone’s heart breaks quietly enough, does it still make a sound?
Because mine does.
Right here.
Right now.
And he doesn’t hear it at all.
***
By the time I make it across the ballroom, I can barely see. The lights blur. The music fades.
I push through the crowd, through the scent of perfume and champagne and too much laughter. I finally make it to the buffet, blinking fast, willing the tears not to fall.
“Are you okay?”
I turn and find Christian standing beside me, watching me with a kind of quiet caution.
I blink at him, stunned for a second. I open my mouth, about to lie, like I always do, but the words don’t come. Instead, I just shake my head.
He nods once, as if he expected it. “The chicken is really good,” he says.
Then, without waiting, he snatches my plate and starts piling food onto it.
“Is it Kai?” he asks, handing the plate back to me.
I don’t answer. I don’t need to.
“Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
I hesitate. “Christian, I don’t think—”
“Just trust me.”
He’s already moving, weaving through the crowd. And I follow, still holding the overstuffed plate, because I don’t know what else to do.
We reach the stairs and start climbing. One flight, then another. The house is quieter up here. Dimmer. We turn a few corners, past heavy doors and old portraits, until finally, he stops in front of a room and pushes the door open.
It’s a study, one where the air smells like old paper and cedar. And there’s a large, cluttered desk by the window.
Christian walks over to it, opens a drawer, and starts pulling things out carefully.
Finally, he straightens, holding something that looks like…
a book?
It’s worn around the edges, the spine cracked but cared for.
He turns to me. “What was it that Kai called you? Soreya?”
I nod slowly.
Christian flips through a few pages, then stops. His fingers trace the top of the page before he tilts the book toward me.
It’s a poem. The title is scrawled across the top in fading ink: Soreya.
“Irina Steele was a poet,” he says. “This is one of her unfinished poems. She never got the chance to publish it.”
Soreya
I dreamed her name before I knew it,
soft as snowmelt, sharp as bone.
She came when the clocks unspoke themselves
and the moon turned to stone.
She came when the walls began whispering,
when thought unravelled like thread.
She braided my silence into a crown,
and placed it upon my head.
Was she a ghost I loved too well,
or love that made me ghost?
A wound that dressed itself in silk
A cure that hurt the most
Some nights she bound the fractures,
and stitched the dark with song.
Some nights she unstitched me faster,
and I loved her for it wrong.
They ask me if she saved me.
They ask what her name implies.
I say: star that drowns in daylight,
ghost that teaches lies.
Soreya, Soreya
you bloom in the corner of reason.
Some call you beloved,
but I call you season.
They told me to stop writing her.
They locked all the pens away.
But I still hear her singing
when the mirrors look away.
I don’t know if…
By the time I finish reading, my vision is blurred.
I don’t even realize I’m crying until a tear splashes onto the page, darkening the corner of the paper. I blink hard, but more follow, carving cold lines down my cheeks.
I look up, breath catching.
Christian is leaning against the edge of the desk, arms crossed now, his eyes shadowed with something I recognize as grief.
“Why are you showing me this?” I wipe at my face, uselessly. “Especially if it’s not even finished.”
“Does anything really need to be finished to hold meaning?” He swallows once. His eyes drop to the poem, still open in my hands, before lifting back to meet mine. “And the way he looks at you sometimes…” he says, “Like you’re the last open door in a burning, smoky house.”
I freeze.
“But an open door in a fire is—” I start, voice shaky.
“Exactly,” Christian says, cutting me off gently.
A way out.
A last chance.
A risk.
But none of that even matters. It will never matter. Because to him, all I am is oxygen. And oxygen never puts out a fire.
There’s nothing heroic about being the open door if all you’re doing is making the fire worse.
I swallow hard, gaze flicking to the poem again.
“There is no peace in Kai,” Christian says suddenly. “Just rage. Fire. And it looks a lot like genius until you get close enough to feel the heat.”
I look at him. Really look at him. His expression isn’t cruel or bitter. It’s just tired. It’s the expression of someone who’s been watching the same fire burn for too long, hoping it might go out on its own.
“But he wasn’t always like that, right?” I ask quietly.
“No,” he says, his jaw tightening. “But he was always heading there.”
I don’t know why that unsettles me so much. Maybe it’s the way he says it.
The way she makes it seem like it was destined from the start.
Like there was never a version of Kai that didn’t break.
I stare at the floor, something uneasy twisting inside me. Because I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know if I can believe that.
Was he always meant to be this way? Or did something happen that influenced it?
Did he fall, or was he pushed?
Because a person does not turn cold without reason. A fire does not burn itself out unless something has smothered it first.
And a tree that is not watered does not just forget how to grow, it just learns to reach for the storm instead.
You don’t wake up one day and decide to be angry. You don’t just choose to shut people out. That’s something learned.
And when you’ve been let down enough times, when every outstretched hand has turned to dust in your palm, you stop reaching for them at all.
No one is born with ruin in their bones.
No one comes into this world meant for destruction.
And no one—no one—is meant to be a storm.
I stand and cross to the window.
The sun’s starting to set now, casting a warm orange glow over the garden below. Everything’s golden and soft, like the world has finally decided to be kind, for just a second.
I stare at it numbly.
Christian steps up beside me, following my gaze.
“It’s brilliant, isn’t it?” he says after a beat. And then he exhales, almost smiling. “Endings can be beautiful, too.”
And for the first time all night, I have nothing left to say.