Chapter Thirty Five
Cassandra
“You broke us. Not me. You.”
The tears drip hot down my face. “You did this.”
I can still hear the words vibrating in my skull, the echo wedged so deep inside me that no amount of squeezing my eyes shut will ever force it out.
Sometimes I wonder if it would have been different.
If I had just swallowed the words, just shut up and said nothing, maybe he would still be here.
Maybe he would have stayed. Maybe I would have still gone to bed every night hoping I wouldn’t wake up—but at least he would have still been breathing somewhere in this world.
Three years.
Three years and the same words still loop in my mind like a curse I carved into myself.
My therapist calls it guilt.
I call it regret.
Dax Kingston.
I close my eyes and he’s there. Those sharp, pale blue eyes that looked like someone painted them from the sky. His full lips—the ones that brought me to my knees, or made me cry, or made me forget how to breathe. The way his arms wrapped around me until they didn’t. Until they let go.
Dax Kingston was my nightmare dressed up like a daydream, and I often wondered how free I would be if I ever let him go—but that’s the thing about freedom. Sometimes it’s just loneliness dressed up as regret.
“Cass, one day when you’re all alone, you’ll remember I didn’t break you.”
His sneer still hits my spine in all the wrong places.
“How can I break something that’s already broken?”
The last words he ever said to me still haunt me.
“You are broken.”
The words still hurt. The words still circle me like vultures. And as I stand in the same room where he spat them, a room now empty and lined with dust motes drifting through slanted sunlight like a mockery of a halo, I close my eyes and I scream.
I scream for the girl I once was.
I scream for the silence that suffocates me.
But most of all, I scream because he’s not here anymore.
I expect the universe to answer—to crack open with thunder, to drown the world in rain, to split the sky with lightning. Something. Anything that might let me know I’m not alone in this grief. But the crushing realisation lands heavy and cold.
I am alone.
And when the scream tears itself raw from my throat, when I’m stood there heart racing, lungs burning, cheeks soaked, the only thing I hear is that same suffocating silence that has stalked me ever since he walked out of my life.
My legs buckle. I sink to the ground, pain vibrating through my kneecaps as they slam into the hardwood. My hair spills around my face, my head bowing like I’m praying to something I stopped believing in a long time ago. Something that was never coming to save me.
Girls like me don’t get saved.
We get left.
We get left to gather the shards of our own hearts, knowing we will never be whole again.
We are told to pick ourselves up, to be strong, to not let our pasts defeat us—but I don’t want to be strong anymore.
Strength in pain isn’t strength at all. It’s a mask.
A performance. A way of making everyone else more comfortable.
And I’m tired.
I’m so fucking tired of drowning quietly so no one else has to get wet.
“My pain is real. I am real.”
I whisper it to nobody, and even that feels like the biggest lie I’ve ever told myself.
Footsteps creak behind me, but I don’t lift my head. I don’t move. I hope, absurdly, that the floor might swallow me whole.
“Cass?”
I shake my head, hard, wishing she would just go. Leave me here. Let me rot with my memories. Let me die with the ghost of his voice.
“Cass, please talk to me.”
I squeeze my eyes shut even tighter, willing the darkness to open and swallow me like a black hole.
Her footsteps move closer—slow, hesitant.
I hear the scuff of her shoes, the uneven breath, the fear.
“Don’t.”
My voice is a rasp.
“Leave me alone. I don’t want your pity. I don’t want you here. Go. Leave me to rot.”
Silence drops again.
Oh, sweet, suffocating silence.
“Cass, I’m not leaving you.”
Her voice sighs, soft but unyielding.
“I don’t want you here.”
“Well, isn’t that a shame. It’s been three years and you are still living in—”
I spin so fast the rage almost throws me off balance.
Standing.
Shaking.
Not small anymore—just furious.
“Don’t say his fucking name.”
Her eyes soften the way people’s do when they pity you.
“Don’t you dare.”
“Cass, please let me help you. You can’t live like this. I’m worried about you.”
I shake my head, stare at the floor because looking at her hurts too much.
Every time I look at her, all I see is him.
“Cass, talk to me,” she pleads.
“Please just go,” I whisper.
“Dax wouldn’t want this.”
There it is.
The one thing I couldn’t bear to hear.
My eyes drag up her small frame—her tanned legs in tennis shoes, her pristine white dress hugging her like innocence could save her, her wild auburn hair pouring down her shoulders, right up to those piercing blue eyes that echo his.
“I don’t give a fuck what he would want,” I spit, the tears clawing their way up again. “I can’t even say his name. Three years and I still can’t.”
“You don’t mean that,” she murmurs.
“Get the fuck out of my house.”
What I really mean is: Leave me alone with the memories. Leave me with the ghost of him.
Silence drops.
Brutal.
Echoing.
My words bounce off the walls, ricocheting straight back into the hollow where my heart used to live.
She sighs, turns, walks to the door.
She gives me exactly what I asked for—permission to drown.
“Cass?”
I lift my head.
“You break your own heart by staying here. You don’t need to drown alone. Fuck, you don’t need to drown at all. Come find me when you’ve decided to stop living in the shadow of my brother’s ghost.”
Her words hit harder than I let her see.
The moment she’s gone, I collapse again—but this time, there’s no scream. No theatrics. No violence.
Just quiet, unravelling devastation.
I fall to my knees and the tears slide silently, a steady, endless river, as I break in a way I’ve never broken before.
The floor is cold beneath my cheek, the boards digging into my skin, but I don’t move.
I can’t.
The sobs rip through me in waves, tearing at my chest, convulsing through my ribs until I feel like something inside me might snap. I choke on the silence that follows Lola’s retreat. She’s gone. It’s just me and the ghosts again.
Maybe she’s right.
Maybe I am drowning but God, part of me wants to. Because I don’t know how to breathe in a world that doesn’t have him in it.
Tears smear across the floor, sinking into the cracks, the same way my grief has sunk into every part of my life.
Three years and I still live like he left yesterday.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I whisper to the floorboards, to the universe, to whatever cruel god is listening. “I can’t keep pretending I’m alive when I died the day you didn’t come back.”
The words echo.
A confession.
A surrender.
My fists tighten against my stomach, trying to hold myself together, but I can’t stop shaking. Another sob rips free, then another, and another, until my throat burns and my lungs scream and it feels like my body is tearing itself apart.
Then—Boots.
A sound so familiar it slices straight through me.
Heavy.
Steady.
Impossible.
My breath freezes.
“Leave me to die, Lola,” I whisper without lifting my head. “Please. Just leave me. I can’t—I can’t do this.”
The footsteps don’t stop.
They grow closer.
Louder.
Real.
Something cold brushes my palm.
Metal.
A chain.
My eyes open through tears.
The necklace.
The one I thought had vanished into the desert with his body or his ghost.
It lies in my palm like a miracle or a threat.
“No…” My voice breaks. “This isn’t real.”
But the boots keep coming.
The air shifts as a shadow falls over me.
Slowly—terrified, breathless—I lift my head.
And he’s there.
Dax Kingston.
Alive.
Breathing.
Standing in the doorway like death spat him back out.
His eyes—the blue I thought I’d never see again—lock on mine, and his lips curl into that same devastating, dangerous smile that ruined my life.
“Hello, Butterfly.”