The Ruin I Chose (Devotion & Damage #1)

PROLOGUE

There’s a kind of loneliness that doesn’t scream.

It just sits inside you—quiet, patient, waiting for someone to notice.

Every woman, at some point, endures it. Silently.

At first, you survive it. Let it creep in.

Then it consumes you until there’s nothing left of the one thing that made you, you.

I lived in that silence for years.

Married. Presentable. Unkissed.

No one asked if I was okay.

No one wondered if the smile I wore was real or rehearsed. No one asked if I felt seen or wanted.

No one asked if I was touched.

I was a wife. A mother. A woman with good taste, empty dreams, and a hollow chest.

I learned how to smile without feeling. How to make spaces breathe.

How to make a home look beautiful while mine was crumbling.

How to say “I’m fine” and mean “I’m starving.”

I didn’t know what I was starving for.

Not exactly. Not until he came my way.

And then I remembered.

What it felt like to ache.

To be truly seen. To be devoured. To be wanted in a way that made me forget my own name.

It wasn’t love. Not at first. It was something deeper, darker.

Something sharper. Something that made me feel alive.

And I let it happen.

I let him happen.

Even though I knew it would cost me—my conscience, my guilt, my sanity.

Because some people don’t just touch your body. They touch the parts of you, you buried.

The ones you swore no one would ever find.

And when they leave—

You don’t just miss them.

You miss the version of yourself they awakened in you.

And sometimes, when the house is quiet, and the child is asleep, I still feel her—the woman he woke up in me, the one I thought I’d lost forever.