Scarlett
Idon’t remember deciding to stand up.
I just realise I am—bare feet on cold, wet marble that still carries the ghost of his heat, the room tilting slightly on its axis like the foundations of the villa are being swallowed by the jungle.
My balance is off, my equilibrium shattered, as if my body hasn’t finished processing the wreckage Kai just made of me while my brain is already screaming in a language I don’t recognise.
The mirror across from me catches my reflection, and I don’t recognise the woman staring back through the thinning haze of steam.
Her eyes are too bright, wide and glassy with a frantic, animal light.
Her skin is too pale, except for the high, feverish flush on her cheekbones and the dark, blooming marks hidden beneath the silk of her robe.
Her mouth keeps opening like she’s about to scream, a silent, jagged prayer for help, and then remembering she’s not allowed to—that she’s a prisoner who’s started to love the taste of the iron in her cage.
He’s here. The thought detonates again, a violent, unstoppable explosion in the centre of my chest.
He’s here. Not a memory. Not a nightmare. Not a goddamn voice I invented to survive the suffocating loneliness of the life Noah built for me.
Kai is on this island, and the very air feels heavier, thicker, like it’s saturated with his scent—salt, rain, and a dark, obsessive hunger.
My hands start shaking so badly I have to grip the edge of the vanity until my knuckles turn into white stones to keep myself upright.
The stone is cool and grounding, but it doesn’t fucking help.
Nothing helps. My chest feels too tight, like my ribs have shrunk overnight, crushing my heart, and my lungs didn’t get the memo that they’re supposed to keep me alive.
I press my palm flat against the mirror, my fingers smearing the condensation.
“You’re not real,” I whisper, the words breaking against the glass because if I don’t say it out loud, I might believe something even worse. “You can’t be. You’re a haunting. You’re a ghost.”
But my body doesn’t listen to my lies. My body already knows the truth—it can still feel the way he stretched me, the way he claimed me, the way he ruined the very concept of Noah’s touch.
I drag my fingers down my face, smearing leftover steam, leftover tears, and the leftover panic that tastes like copper on my tongue.
My reflection looks… unhinged. Like a woman who’s been holding herself together with a single, fraying thread and just watched someone set a match to it and laugh while it burned.
He came back. After all this time. After everything. After I tried—God, I tried until my soul was numb—to erase him from the map of my skin.
I built a whole life around the jagged, hollow absence of Kai.
I told myself he forgot me. I told myself I was nothing more than a bad chapter in a book he’d already thrown into the fire, a mistake, a place he burned down and walked away from without looking back.
I told myself that his silence was mercy.
And now he’s here, breathing the same humid, salt-choked air, walking the same ground, watching me with those predator’s eyes like he never fucking left.
A sob claws its way out of my throat, raw and ugly, before I can stop it.
“No,” I whisper, shaking my head as if I can reject reality. “No, you should’ve stayed gone. You should have let me stay dead.”
My legs finally give out, the strength evaporating from my marrow, and I slide down the vanity until I’m sitting on the bathroom floor.
I pull my knees to my chest, huddling there like I’m sixteen again and hiding from a storm I don’t have the words for yet.
The tiles are cold, biting into my skin, and I welcome the pain.
I need something sharp and real to cut through the fog of him.
He didn’t have the right.
That’s the part that hurts the most. That’s the part that makes me want to scream until my lungs fail.
He didn’t have the right to come back and rip open a wound I stitched closed with my own hands, one agonising thread at a time.
He didn’t have the right to look at me like I was still his—like he owned the very blood in my veins—when I spent years convincing myself I belonged to no one. Least of all him.
I press my forehead to my knees and I cry.
Not pretty tears. Not cinematic, tear-stained-cheekbones-at-the-altar tears. These are ugly, silent, body-wracking sobs that make my shoulders jerk and my breath stutter like it’s catching on something jagged and rusted inside me.
“I didn’t deserve this,” I whisper into my own skin, my voice muffled by the silk. “I didn’t deserve you.”
Because that’s the truth I never let myself say in the daylight. It would’ve been easier if he’d forgotten me. Easier if I’d been insignificant, a footnote in his violent history. Easier if I’d been replaceable.
But him coming back means I mattered. And that terrifies me more than his absence ever did, because if I matter to a monster, then I’m already halfway to becoming one myself.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to find a dark corner in my mind, but the memories bleed in anyway—the low, dangerous rumble of his voice, the way he used to look at me like he saw straight through every lie I told myself, the way my name sounded different in his mouth.
It wasn’t softer. It was sharper. Like a blade being drawn slowly across my throat.
I hate that part of myself. The part that Kai built.
I hate that my first instinct isn’t to run until my feet bleed.
It’s why now? It’s what does he want? It’s what does this mean for the girl I’m pretending to be?
I hate that my pulse spikes at the thought of him being this close, lurking in the shadows of the villa like a wolf in a garden.
I hate that my fear is tangled with something darker, something traitorous and filthy, something that makes my stomach twist in on itself with a hunger that should be dead.
I don’t deserve him. I don’t deserve this wreckage.
I drag myself upright eventually, because collapsing won’t stop the gears of the machine he’s already set in motion. I move like I’m underwater—slow, heavy, every step deliberate as I go through the motions of getting ready for the man who thinks he’s my fiancé.
Dress. Hair. Makeup.
The motions are muscle memory—polished, controlled, the perfect, hollow version of me that Noah expects to see at his side. The version that passes for human.
But my mind is nowhere near this room. It’s in the jungle. It’s in the dark. It’s on the edge of something feral and inevitable.
He came back for you, a voice whispers in the back of my skull, sounding far too much like Kai.
No, I tell it viciously, my hands trembling as I fasten an earring. He came back to ruin me. To finish the job. I drop the other earring. It clatters to the floor with a sharp, metallic ring, and the sound makes me flinch like a gunshot.
Get it together. Get it together. Get it fucking together. I stare at myself one last time before leaving the bathroom.
I look fine. I look expensive. I look ready to be a bride.
That’s the most terrifying part.
Because underneath the silk and the composure and the expensive, curated calm, something old and dangerous is waking up—something I buried in a shallow grave because it was easier than admitting I still wanted it.
Still wanted him. Still wanted the destruction he brings.
Kai should have stayed a ghost.
Because now that he’s real again, I don’t know if I’m strong enough to survive the truth—the truth that every part of me has been waiting for him to come and take me back to the dark.
I open the door, and the air of the bedroom hits me like a physical barrier—colder, drier, and thick with the scent of Noah’s expensive cologne, which usually smells like success but tonight just smells like a cover-up.
He’s sitting in the armchair near the balcony, a glass of amber liquid in his hand, his silhouette framed by the encroaching black of the jungle outside. He doesn’t look up immediately. He just swirls the ice, the clink-clink-clink sounding like a countdown.
“You were in there a long time, Scarlett,” he says, his voice deceptively smooth, the way a lake looks right before something breaks the surface.
I don’t answer. I can’t. Every time I breathe, I feel the ghost of Kai’s fingers on my throat, the weight of him still heavy in my lower belly. I feel like a walking sin, a woman glazed in the sweat and shadows of a man who isn’t the one holding the ring.
“The steam,” I manage to say, my voice sounding like it’s coming from someone else, someone miles away. “I just… I needed to clear my head.”
Noah stands up, slow and predatory. He crosses the room toward me, his movements precise, his eyes narrow and searching. He stops just inches away, invading my personal space with the entitlement of a man who thinks he’s already won.
He leans in, his nose brushing against my temple, inhaling deeply.
I freeze. My heart is a frantic bird hitting the bars of its cage. Please don’t smell him. Please don’t find the rot beneath the floral soap.
“You smell… different,” Noah murmurs, his hand coming up to trace the line of my jaw. His fingers are dry and cold, nothing like the rough, burning heat of Kai’s palms. “Like salt. And something… wild.”
He’s looking for a reason to break me. I can see it in the twitch of his jaw, the way his thumb presses just a little too hard against my skin, pinning me in place.
“It’s the island, Noah,” I whisper, my eyes fixed on his silk tie because I can’t look him in the eye without him seeing the monster’s reflection in my pupils. “The humidity. It gets into everything.”