* * * *
EVERYONE
The days blended like blood in water.
Carson never spoke much, but everyone knew his name. The guy who walked into the basketball court with his sleeves rolled, hair a perfect mess, and a gaze that pierced through skin and into your marrow. No one really knew what he did when he wasn't at school—only that when he played, crowds formed. Like moths to flame, like sinners to confession. Elise watched from the second-floor windows sometimes. Pretending not to. Pretending it wasn't for him.
But Carson saw. He always saw.
He lived like a ghost. Elise knew that better than anyone. She stayed in his penthouse now—though they barely saw each other. When she woke, warm meals were waiting. Eggs seasoned with paprika, avocado with a lemon drizzle, even fresh thyme—details too specific to be generic. He wasn't just feeding her. He was studying her. Watching from the shadows like a man obsessed, a man who couldn't quite decide if he loved her or wanted to carve her name into the walls.
Sometimes, Carson stood in the back of classrooms just to watch her laugh at something someone else said. Something light. Something that didn't reek of blood and broken glass. Sometimes he watched her walk down the hall and disappear around a corner, and for that brief moment, he felt everything inside him still. Then it came back—the chaos, the static, the thing inside him that itched to scream.
Ryder was his distraction.
They drank every night at Ryder's bar. The neon lights flickering like the edges of madness, conversations slurred with whiskey and half-meant truths. Ryder, sick as ever, coughed blood into a handkerchief but still made jokes like death wasn't already calling collect.
"You ever think about just... stopping?" Ryder asked one night, his voice gravel and whiskey.
Carson leaned back, nursing a glass of bourbon. "Stopping what?"
"This whole psycho vendetta thing. The gallery, your father, this twisted affection for the girl who doesn't even know you're unraveling for her."
Carson chuckled. "You're the only dying man I know who gives advice like a priest."
"Yeah, well. Figure someone should try and save your soul. Even if it's half burnt."
Meanwhile, Alex was buried in the ER.
His hands worked like a machine, saving lives while trying not to think of the ones he'd lost. The gallery bust had been postponed. Too risky. Too many eyes now. He kept waking up at 3 a.m. with the sound of Elise's scream in his ears and the memory of Carson's bloody knuckles echoing in his chest.
"Dr. Morien, time of death?"
"Three seventeen," Alex would say, deadpan. Every time. Another ghost.
Marco, Dante, and Diego returned to their Michelin-star kitchen. Cooked like the world hadn't tried to kill them. Like truffle risotto and garlic seared duck breast could mask the scent of blood.
Leona, poor Leona, was in the library more than her own bed. Finals. Flashcards. Breakdown after breakdown. She didn't even notice Elise slipping further into silence.
And Elise?
She cut ties with her father. Blocked his calls. Burned the letters. Refused his money. The man who murdered her mother and pretended it was justice. He thought she was acting out. A teenage tantrum. But she wasn't angry.
She was numb.
She told Carson everything one night—about Pierce, about the bet, about the heartbreak that cracked her ribs open. Carson listened, eyes blank, fingers slowly flicking the ash off his cigar.
"What are you doing?" she asked, when he pressed the cherry end of it to the same scar on his collarbone that matched hers.
"Proving your sister right," he said. "Scars find soulmates, don't they?"
It wasn't romantic. It was insane.
Then came the night she admitted she might still like Pierce.
That was the last straw.
Carson dragged her to Ryder's bar, refusing to explain. They saw Pierce there, flirting with another girl. Elise broke. Carson saw it. He felt it like his own heart had been yanked out. He didn't speak. Just lit another cigar and leaned back in his booth.
"I could kill him," he whispered, eyes glazed.
But he didn't. Not yet.
Because even now, the game is still on.
And it was cruel.
A game that punished silence. That feasted on what went unsaid. That demanded you smile in public and scream into pillows in the dark.
It was remembering hands that once trembled for you, now tucked into another's. It was recalling the way your name used to sound like safety, now spat back like venom.
It was Carson staring down at the grooves his nails had carved into the leather, trying to convince himself that not reaching for her was strength.
It was Elise rubbing her arm—right where he used to draw lazy circles with his thumb—and pretending it didn't feel cold now.
Their minds wandered into the past. To the scent of iron and lilies the day Elise saw her mother die on the garden floor. To the echo of footsteps as Carson was dragged down corridors at twelve years old, strapped to chairs, trained like a weapon. To the night Elise stood in the rain after Pierce left her, mascara bleeding, thunder cracking, shoes in hand. To the day Carson lit the fire in the basement, watching as the room filled with smoke, waiting to see if God would stop him. He didn't.
And still—they breathed. Together, yet apart. Bound by old scars and new decisions.
"Let's go," Elise whispered, her voice cracked but deliberate.
Carson blinked out of the memory, nodded. Tossed a bill on the table. He didn't look back.
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