Adrien
Present
A week flew by. No, it crawled by. Actually, it didn’t even crawl. It painfully groveled forward.
And I was here every night.
Every night.
Creeping around, pacing around the room, sneaking by her bed.
Only she doesn’t know that.
Because I fucked up. I messed up so badly that for a moment, I was afraid she might hurt herself somehow.
So I was advised to remain only a “dream” after the collapse. To let her recover peacefully from the breakdown and not complicate it for her.
The first day after, she hasn’t said a word to anyone.
Neither did I.
The next day, she spoke in empty sentences, emotionless.
So did I.
On the third day, she cried for him.
For him, not for me.
That day, I went back on benzodiazepines, following the psychiatrist’s orders.
On the fourth day, she’d found her way back to herself. She talked and laughed with Kiara as if nothing had happened. I heard it. It felt like my heart was stitched back together and then broken again instantly, over and over and over.
On the fifth night, she held my hand for a few seconds. But she was asleep, I think. I finally slept that night too.
The next night, she woke up and saw me. But no emotion came.
I was like a ghost of the night, one she already seemed used to.
She accepted me, without questioning it, without being surprised.
It felt like she made peace with the illusion sticking around.
She rolled over and went back to the sleep she believed to be ongoing.
And I still had to leave before sunrise every morning, with the same dismal feeling that I’d be gone by the time she truly wakes up.
But she held my hand once. Only briefly, but it happened.
The same way she used to when we were kids. That little Selvaggia saved me back then. She existed and that was enough.
And now she’s the one who needs saving. And I don’t know what to do. I stopped existing for her.
The psychiatrist is feeding her information, patiently constructing reality piece by piece so it doesn’t collapse under its own weight.
Kiara has started talking about me and about Kas too, slipping our names into conversations like they’ve always belonged there, since the mention of our names stopped causing the breakdowns.
But Natalya just lets the words pass through her as if they never settle anywhere.
The world around her is already offering proof of our presence, reflecting it back at her from every angle, but she keeps looking past it.
Or maybe she’s already dealing with it in her own way, quietly, somewhere deep inside the private, sealed-off space of her head, where no one else is allowed to look.
My hair falls cold against my neck and forehead, still slightly damp from the shower, as I already pace around the hall.
The house is quiet, buried in darkness.
I check the time one last time—midnight.
She has to be asleep already. My fingers tremble nervously as I switch my phone into silence and slowly open the door to her suite.
The moonlight illuminates my route the same way it does every night, casting a pale halo straight onto her bed so I can see she’s deep asleep.
My feet carry me to her, then I quietly lower myself by the far edge of the bed and rest my elbows on her mattress.
My eyes quickly glance over at her nightstand, scanning the bottles of pills she has to take. Then I look back at her, my hand already reaching toward her fingers, laying languidly in the sheets.
Her face is buried in the pillow, turned toward the balcony, and I don’t risk going there and waking her up.
My hand ends up just an inch from hers, my finger barely brushing her wrist, silently manifesting that she would reach for me in her dream like she did a couple nights ago.
“So, this,” I start in a whisper. “Is our little routine again.”
I’m only met by her silence, which reassures me to go on.
“I used to do this when we were kids, worried that if you woke up and found out I watched you sleep, you’d be horrified and wouldn’t want me anymore.” I huff out a breath.
“And now,” I say. “I have to do it again. But this time, I’m terrified that if you see me,” I pause, my voice breaking under the whisper. “You’ll collapse,” I force out weakly, my lips trembling. “And I really don’t want that, baby.”
I swallow the lump in my throat, tears rolling down my face.
“I’m so sorry I can’t be here when you wake up,” I croak. “But until it’s safe for us to have another date, I’ll be here every night, watching you like a creep, as always.”
?
More empty days flew by.
No trace of old Devereaux. No one is contacting us. No danger seems to be lurking around the corner, so we just survive each day, waiting in this suspense without knowing when or how we will get out of this mess.
As if he’s torturing us by his silence on purpose, just so we feel like we haven’t accomplished anything by capturing Lucien.
I’m straddling a bench at the gym now, my head falling hopelessly backward, sweat pouring off me in thick drops, streaming into my eyes and blurring everything.
My lungs burn, my pulse is too loud in my ears, but none of it brings the relief it used to. I just feel heavy and trapped inside my own body.
I can’t even do anything properly. I can’t train the way I’m used to.
The bullet wound is closed, healing, but there’s still that inner pulling every time I try to push past the bare minimum.
It’s not sharp pain anymore, just an annoying reminder at this point.
The thigh is fine, technically, but I still can’t put real weight on it.
I can’t use my body to dull the numbness in my chest. There’s nowhere for the excess to go.
No release.
I get up and unzip the boxing gloves with my teeth before slamming them into the wall with all the power I have left.
The impact cracks through the gym, hollow and violent, and the sound hasn’t even finished echoing when Kas is suddenly standing in the entrance, casually informing me that the psychiatrist wants to have another sitting with us.
I grab a towel from the bench and wipe the sweat off my face, dragging it down my neck before letting it hang there as I walk toward Kasien.
“That lady can’t get enough of me,” I say, throwing him a wink as I pass.
He shoots me a judgy look before breaking into a smile.
Good.
At least one of us isn’t actively rotting from the inside anymore.
He hasn’t moved from Kiara’s side since we got her back. They’re like two puppies, always together. It’s adorable, in a way that makes my chest tighten.
I’m happy for them. I really am.
So happy it makes me sick if I think about it for too long. Because watching them have what I can’t have feels like pressing on a fresh bruise.
Maybe I’m a little jealous.
I put some T-shirt on and move into the lobby, dropping into a chair while the psychiatrist folds her hands in her lap and looks at me with a hint of a professional smile, as if she has good news.
Please do have some.
“The medication she was on before wasn’t the best suited for her condition. In combination with trauma and possibly other substances it significantly lowered her ability to distinguish internal experiences from external reality.”
She pauses, letting it settle, while we look at her like two dumb dogs who don’t understand the command but know it’s important.
“In simple terms,” she continues, “the medication made her more distant from reality, while dulling the anger and hysteria.”
She shifts slightly in her chair.
“We changed that after the first session. She’s now on medication that stabilizes perception instead of blurring it. And she’s responding very well.”
“What does it mean for her?” Kas asks.
“Her sense of reality is sharpening. She’s no longer slipping between past and present so often. The hallucinations should continue to fade.”
She hesitates, then adds, “That doesn’t mean she’s healed. It means she’s starting to be grounded and present and that gives us a foundation to work with.”
“And the collapse?” I ask quietly. “The one last week?”
She exhales softly, as if she’s choosing words carefully.
“The pain came from letting herself feel something so alive with someone she believed was no longer alive. The experience was too intense to remain imagined and too painful to survive while knowing it wasn’t real.”
Painful.
That word echoes in my head like a punishment.
“She had grown accustomed to being pulled out of those episodes through methods that bordered on abuse. With you, no one intervened, so she sank too deeply into the illusion, far beyond what she was able to handle at the time.”
My leg starts bouncing restlessly.
“What methods exactly?” I grit out.
“I can’t be sure entirely. But if I use her own words,” she flips a page in her notes. “He always gave me the proof of pain and pressure,” she recites, then glances at us.
My hand uselessly ends up in my hair, gripping them like it could ease whatever is happening inside me right now.
“She was used to balancing between indulging her fantasies and wanting to escape them. Either way, every fantasy ended with the fire or with the…” she trails off, lifting her shoulders. “The pain and pressure.”
“So now she’s confused, because none of it is coming,” I mumble.
“As I mentioned, with the medication she’s on, her perception is stabilizing. She’s better equipped to tolerate intensity without breaking from it.”
I give her a look full of hope, silently pleading for her to say it out loud.
And then she does.
“The collapse—it shouldn’t happen again, I think,” she adds with that professional nod. “Not so intensely at least.”
A rock the size of a moon just fell off my chest. I can almost hear it hit the ground.
She falls silent, as if that’s it, as if there’s not still one big question hanging in the air.
“Does it mean I can see her?” I blurt out.
“I would let her come to you,” the psychiatrist says calmly.
Not happening. Not enough patience for that. Nope.
“What do you mean?”
She tilts her head, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.