Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Seven
For one suspended moment, he continued standing, as
though sheer will might keep him upright. Then his knees folded beneath him and
the weight of him crashed to the floor.
The sound was thick and final. The man she knew who
had never known how to fall being dragged down by gravity and fate all at once.
His flesh and bone met concrete in a way that felt louder than the gunshot
itself.
She watched him go down.
Watched the man who once filled every room with his
presence collapse into dust and silence.
The impact knocked the breath from her chest.
Her fingers loosened involuntarily just as the sound
died. Her knuckles went white around something that no longer felt like a
weapon... only a truth that had finally taken shape.
For a heartbeat, suddenly everything inside her
emptied out.
Then Asli moved.
It wasn’t because she meant to.
Nor was it because she planned to.
Her body just moved before her mind could stop it.
Her boots scraped against the floor as she crossed the space between them, and
her breath tore loose from her chest in a sound she didn’t recognize.
Her arm lifted on instinct, not because she was
looking for him, not because she didn’t know where he was, but because she did.
His shape was already carved into her vision, burned
behind her eyes, and her hand followed it blindly, faithfully, like it had
memorized him, like even now it could still reach for his heart in the dark.
She broke her own momentum just in time, her feet
dragging to a halt so sharply it jarred through her knees. Her hand stayed
suspended between them, empty air humming against her skin, close enough to
feel the heat of him and nothing else.
It trembled there, not because she was afraid to
touch him, but because something inside her had split open and was bleeding
where no one could see.
The word tore loose from her anyway, rough and thin
against the silence.
"No."
The word scraped through her skull like a scream
underwater.
This, this was the moment that mattered. This was
the moment she had loaded for, waited for, promised herself in the dark. The
moment she had told herself she would not flinch.
And yet here she was.
Standing over him.
Breathing him in.
Her chest was burning and it was not from smoke... but
from memory.
His hands on her hips and his mouth at her throat.
Her body suddenly remembered everything that went on
in their hideout before her mind could stop it.
Her mind kept racing. Too much she could pay any
money to make it stop: The way he used to pull her closer when he slept. The
way his mouth had found the fragile places she never gave anyone else. The
sound he used to make only when he let go of control, only when it was her. The
move he always made only when he forgot himself in her.
And suddenly the warehouse was too small to hold all
that history.
Her teeth sank into her lip hard enough to punish
the thought until the ache in her mouth was louder than what tried to rise
inside her chest.
She staggered back.
Then another step.
Then another.
Distance was the only thing keeping her upright now,
the only thing that stopped her from helping him while he bled. The idiot



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