Kai
The house is too quiet.
Too fucking still.
Scar’s upstairs. I can hear her footsteps—light, uneven—pacing maybe. Or maybe I’m imagining it, because every sound is her. Everything is her.
I should be in there with her. I should be holding her, kissing her, keeping her safe.
Instead, I’m down here with blood in my mouth that isn’t blood, rage I can’t spit out, smoke that won’t burn enough.
I knew it.
I fucking knew it.
She lied. She broke—but she lied first. I heard it in her voice, in the way she shook when I pressed her. And tonight—Tyler’s laugh in that bar, the way his eyes slid over her like he owned even a piece of her—
No.
No, he never owned her. He never will.
But he touched her.
Scar begged me to erase it. Begged me to put my hands where his had been, begged me to drown it out with my skin and my mouth and every part of me that knows her better than she knows herself—
And I did. God, I did. And I’d do it again until her voice is only my name, until the memory of him is a corpse rotting in the dirt.
The cigarette trembles between my fingers.
I crush it out half-finished and drive my fists into the wall until plaster dust drifts down like snow.
It doesn’t stop the rage. It doesn’t stop the vision of him at the cinema, grinning with his filthy hands on her thigh while she smiled back like she didn’t know she was mine.
She was mine even then.
She was mine before she ever understood it.
And he dared—he fucking dared—
I can’t breathe. I can’t think past the noise. It’s blood. It’s Scar’s sobs. It’s Tyler’s laugh.
I see his throat in my hands. I hear the crack. I hear the silence after.
Nobody touches her. Nobody fucking touches her but me.
I pace the kitchen like an animal. Every shadow is his face. Every reflection in the glass is Scar’s body bent beneath me, trembling, begging for more, begging for release. And over it all, the phantom image of him stealing even a second of what belongs only to me.
I’m shaking. I’m laughing. I don’t even know which.
She said she loves me. She said it—she broke saying it. And that means I can’t let this go. I can’t forgive. I can’t forget.
He touched her once.
That’s all he gets.
Next time?
Next time, I’ll put him in the ground.