Mine to Hunt (Hudson Yards #5)

Prologue

KEIRA

Do you ever sit in the quiet and let your mistakes find you?

Every wrong turn you made believing it was the only road.

Every time you laughed when you wanted to scream.

Every no that died on your tongue because you'd already learned what happened when you said it aloud.

Every night you pressed your face into a pillow and sobbed without making a sound because somewhere along the way, even your grief turned invisible.

Do you ever think about the other life? Not the perfect one. I stopped believing in perfect a long time ago. But the possible one.

The shadow life that runs parallel to this one, just out of reach.

The version of you who didn't learn love through endurance.

Who wasn't taught that suffering was the price of being seen.

Who didn't have to learn there was a price on love.

Because I do.

All the time.

I used to believe love would be gentle.

That someone would look at me and see something worth choosing. Worth staying for, without conditions or bruises hidden beneath long sleeves.

Instead, I learned that love can look like chains. The kind that lives between your ribs, tightening every time you breathe too deeply.

Love became a voice that whispered I was lucky anyone stayed at all. That I should be grateful for scraps. That no one else would ever want something this broken.

So I made myself smaller. Quieter.

Until I forgot what it felt like to take up space in my own life.

I did all of it alone.

Endured alone. Disappeared alone.

I brought my son into this world in a room full of strangers—no one holding my hand, no voice telling me I would be okay.

Just bright, indifferent lights and machines that didn't care whether I lived or died.

And through all of it, my heart kept reaching for someone who wasn't there.

Someone I pushed away with a lie I told myself was mercy.

There was a man once.

Before all of this.

A man who looked at me like I was inevitable. Not a choice. Not an option. But a certainty.

He didn't try to fix me or soften me. He saw the sharp edges and the dark corners and the damage I tried to hide, and he didn't look away.

I think about him on the nights when breathing feels optional. When the walls press in and the silence gets too loud.

I think about what would have happened if I'd told him the truth instead of a lie designed to save his life.

If I'd trusted him to fight for us instead of deciding he was better off without me.

If I'd chosen differently.

But I didn't.

And now I live in a beautiful house with a man who knows exactly how to hurt me without leaving evidence. A man who wears me down in places no one can see.

Some nights I want to go back. Find the girl I used to be, grab her by the shoulders, and scream: Run.

But I can't go back.

And she can't hear me.

The loneliest part isn't the bruises or the fear.

It's the erasure.

Being a ghost in your own home.

Watching yourself disappear in real time.

Knowing with devastating certainty what it feels like to be seen. To be wanted. To be loved without conditions—and never experiencing it again.

The truth is, some loves don't come to save you.

Some loves come to mark you.

To burn themselves so deep into your bones that nothing else will ever fit in the space they leave behind.

To ruin you for ordinary.

To make sure every gentle touch feels like a pale imitation.

Every whispered word sounds like an echo of something realer.

Every almost feels like a mockery of the once.

He was my once.

Not the love I was meant to keep, but the one I was meant to be haunted by.

I hold onto the memories anyway. Guard them like contraband. Because some nights they're the only proof that I wasn't always this hollow.

The only reminder that once, before everything fell apart, someone saw me.

And in another universe, one where I was brave enough to stay, maybe he's still seeing me now.

That's the thing about ghosts.

They don't haunt houses.

They haunt the people who can't stop remembering.

And I have never, not once, stopped.