Prologue #2
Standing up on shaky legs, I resolve to make all of this right. I’m going to find Trevor. And I’m going to make him pay. Even more than that, I am going to make him beg for his life before I end it slowly.
But before that, before any of it, I’m going to tell her.
I love her.
And I’ll never let her forget it.
I walk out without looking back, each step heavier than the last. I get into my car, start the engine again, and drive home. A place that should be warm and inviting, now haunted with more memories I cannot bear to face.
The house is filled with an unbearable silence except for the occasional tick of the grandfather clock downstairs in the hall and the low hum of the heater kicking on.
I drag myself upstairs and go through the motion of peeling off my jacket and clothes, throwing them over the chair in the corner of my room.
I heavily pad into the bathroom to wash my face and tug on a pair of gray sweatpants, then pull a white T-shirt over my head.
Looking in the mirror, I swear I have aged twenty years in the last twelve hours.
I press my fingers to my temples in a slow rotating motion, praying and willing the exhaustion to take over, but it doesn’t.
Not one fiber in my being is going to calm down until she wakes up.
Sleep is not going to come tonight. Not when she feels like an entire lifetime away.
I trudge down the stairs to my study. The fire that was burning this morning is long dead in the grate.
My eyes scan the room, and I walk toward the sleek wooden wet bar nestled in the corner of the room and pour a nightcap.
Drink of choice tonight? Cheap whiskey. I need the burn.
Fuck the smoothness of my expensive ass wine.
I take a sip of the amber liquid, and I relish in the bite as it glides down my throat.
You don’t need that, Kieran.
My hair stands up on the back of my neck at the sound of the female voice.
If I believed in ghosts, I’d swear I just heard the unmistakable voice of my late wife.
Shaking the thought from my head, I turn toward the fireplace next to the bar, add some more firewood, and light a small piece of starter paper.
I place it under the logs and grab the poker to ignite a spark.
Walking over to my desk, I pull the high-back cushioned chair away. The wheels scratch across the old wooden floor. Sitting down, I pull the journal from my coat pocket. I set it on my desk and stare at it as if it will combust at any moment and burn a hole in the damn wood.
Opening the drawer to grab a pen, I catch a glimpse of my own old journal. It’s been sitting there in the same place collecting dust.
The one I haven’t touched in years. The one I used to fill with pages about Alexis, about grief, guilt, and everything I couldn’t say out loud.
Who knew I would be here again ten years later? The universe has a sick sense of humor.
With Deirdre, I had begun to write again, with a different purpose. Filled with love, hope, and excitement. I write tonight not because I know what to say exactly, but because I need to say something.
Deirdre,
Tonight, after leaving the hospital, I couldn’t go home. So, I came to the one place I could feel you.
Then, I found your words.
I wasn’t looking for them, I swear. But they were mine to read eventually, right? I feel like the last twelve hours have been a nightmare I can’t wake up from. It almost makes the last few months and the time we spent together seem like a dream, or an illusion.
But it’s not. It never was.
I remember the first time I saw you.
You walked into Salvation like it was the last place you wanted to be.
Head down, shoulders tight, body tense with your arms wrapped around you like you were bracing for impact.
You were guarded. I could see it. Walking through the bar, the air around you wasn’t loud or attention-seeking.
It was calm but charged. Like static silence before a storm.
You wore all black. Fitted jeans, combat boots, a threadbare hoodie that didn’t match the sleek, seductive aesthetic of the place.
Your dark black hair was flowing in messy curls just above your shoulders.
It acted like a curtain, reinforcing that you didn’t want to be noticed —which, ironically, made you stand out even more. A paradox in the flesh.
I was nursing a drink at the bar, trying to ignore the headache from the night before, and the throbbing ache in my chest, a void I was going to attempt to fill yet again that night.
Gabe was behind the bar, cleaning glasses with the kind of mechanical rhythm that only comes from years of doing the same shit.
I saw you step in through the back hallway, escorted by some of the newer staff.
Your eyes darted everywhere, taking in the environment around you, but never lingered on one singular spot.
Not toward the dancers on the stage. Not on the booths.
Not even on the bartenders. You had that look.
The one people get when they’ve learned not to trust anyone or anything.
I recognized it, because I bear that look every day, or I did.
You flinched as people moved past you, avoiding stares when people addressed you. You seemed uncomfortable. Your walls were high, fortified. I could see it in the way you didn’t want to take up space. Your need to hide only made me notice you more.
So naturally, I couldn’t look away.
I asked Gabe who you were, trying my best to sound uninterested, but I knew then that wasn’t the case. I rarely talked to the man, because Vincent was running things in the background. That club is his well-oiled machine, as you now know.
He barely glanced up from the glass he was drying.
“Some college kid. Transferred from somewhere out west. Vincent says she’s edgy and has a quick wit. Doesn’t want to dance. Just needs the money. She will be one of the new cocktail waitresses. We’ll see if she can hold her own.”
I nodded like I didn’t care, but I did. I cared more than I should’ve.
Something about you told me you could hold your own.
There was something in the way you moved—something cautious, like you had been hurt before but knew how to survive it.
I recognized it because I have seen the same expression on my own face when I look in the mirror.
Something in your eyes reminded me of the first few days after Alexis died.
That same haunted vacancy. Like the light had been yanked out of you and you were still learning how to fake its glow.
Underneath that timid, careful exterior, I saw the beauty you were trying to hide. You didn’t flaunt it like the other staff. No desperation. No performative sex appeal. None of the usual things that cling to new hires, like the overuse of perfume or cleavage pouring out of your shirt.
You didn’t come here to be looked at.
You came here because you had no choice.
And maybe that’s what struck me the most—the quiet defiance in your body language. You didn’t look scared. You looked done. Done with pretending, done with pleasing, done with playing some role the world expected of you.
You didn’t notice me that night. Or if you did, you didn’t let it show. But I watched you for longer than I should’ve. Long enough to know you weren’t like the others.
You reminded me of something I didn’t think I’d ever feel again.
Curiosity.
Not lust. Not infatuation. Not even admiration, yet.
Just…that quiet, magnetic pull that starts in your gut and works its way up to your ribs. The kind that makes you want to know someone—not fuck them, not fix them, but understand them.
I didn’t know your name yet.
But something inside me told me I wanted to.
Kieran
I stare at the ink as it bleeds into the page. The words are a raw, clumsy truth I’ve kept buried for too long. My fingers flex around the pen, reluctant to set it down. Like if I keep writing, I can hold her here. Keep her from slipping further away.
The scratch of my pen slows, but I write one more sentence, and I stop.
“She reminded me of something I didn’t think I’d ever feel again. Curiosity.”
Tomorrow, I’ll write again.
And the day after that.
As long as she stays unconscious, I’ll keep writing. Every single day. I’ll remember her for both of us. Because someone has to. These words will keep her alive, right?
With me, in this lifetime.
And because if she doesn’t come back to me…these pages might be the only place where she still exists.
I don’t have to let her go.
I can’t.
I close the journal, the leather warm from my touch, and sit back in my chair, resting my head against the plush cushions.
The light in my study is low, flickering from the fire I haven’t tended in the last hour as I wrote.
The flames are dying, just like everything else in my life feels like it is crumbling apart.
My glass of whiskey sits sweating on the desk, leaving a wet ring on the wood and untouched since that first sip.
Truthfully, I poured it out of habit. Something I retreat to when my world is crumbling down. I don’t need it tonight.
Or maybe I do. But it won’t help. Nothing will. Not when she’s still lying in the fucking hospital bed. Not when I can’t stop seeing her lying on the concrete floor in a pool of dark red blood.
Leaning forward with my elbows on the desk, I press the heels of my palms against my eyes, like I can force the memory out. Like I can unsee it.
But it comes anyway.
Deirdre, at the bottom of the stairwell. Broken. Bleeding. The way her body didn’t move. The stillness that stole the air from my lungs. That second—that single, suspended second—when I thought she was gone…
It almost killed me. I physically felt my heart crack into pieces as I held her against me and watched her blood stop flowing. I wanted my soul to leave my body and join her wherever she was at the moment.
And now, hours later, I’m sitting here, writing about the first time I saw her—like an idiot trying to rewind time. As if remembering it will undo what’s happened.
But I do remember. Every goddamn detail.
Now here we are.
It’s only been seven months since I first saw her, three months since she and I succumbed to the forceful connection that pulled us together, but I swear it feels like I have known her for years—shit, even a lifetime.
And now she’s in a hospital bed with tubes in her veins, down her throat, and bruises on her face, and I don’t know if she’s coming back to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever hear her laugh again, or feel her hand in mine, or wake up to her breath on my neck.
I don’t know how to exist if she doesn’t wake up.
My heart begins to pound, and I become too restless to stay seated in the chair.
I pace the room, running a hand through my hair.
At the hospital, I tried to hold it together and keep my composure for Claire, for Gabe, hell, even the staff.
Because fuck knows, I could have killed someone.
I wanted to. I still do. I just need to find this person.
But I’m fraying at the edges, every minute feeling like a mile between us.
She doesn’t know I sat beside her bed all night. That I read to her. That I held her hand even when it scared the hell out of me. That I whispered her name until my voice went hoarse.
She doesn’t know I begged her to come back.
Or maybe she does.
Maybe she heard me. God, I hope she did.
They say patients in a coma can still hear, and it’s the last thing to go before someone—No, I can’t even think that right now.
I stop in front of the window, looking out at the dark, silent street.
A light snow is starting to fall. Gentle.
Slow. Not super common for a heavy snow in December for New Haven, but the light flurries sticking to the ground make the world look clean.
Peaceful. Like maybe my reality doesn’t hurt as much as it does.
But it does.
I press my forehead to the cool glass, closing my eyes. I think about her voice. The way she said my name in class, hinting at our mischief. When she needed me. When she trusted me enough to unravel in front of me.
And I realize something that terrifies me more than anything else.
The grief I felt when Alexis died was a clean, quick thing. A knife to the chest. Swift and final. It gutted me, hollowed me out, left me stumbling through the ruins of my life with nothing but guilt and memories to keep me warm.
But this?
This is something else entirely.
This is slower. Real, brutal, and all-consuming, and ungodly cruel. Because it’s raw, unconditional love.
It’s not death.
Not yet.
It’s the possibility of it—not knowing if she’ll open her eyes, if I’ll ever hear her laugh again, feel her fingers loop through mine.
With Alexis, it was over.
With Deirdre, I’m stuck in the purgatory of hope.
And somehow…that’s worse.
Because I still have everything to lose.
And it’s her.
Not a memory. Not a ghost.
Her.
And if she doesn’t wake up—if she slips away from me—I won’t just lose someone I love.
I’ll lose the part of me I didn’t even know was alive until I saw her walk into that goddamn club.