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“A fucking menace.” I snort a laugh just as my sunshine disappears from sight.

“You’re right. Probably not the best time.”

She’s at least heading in the right direction—toward her car. I set an alarm on my phone for fourteen minutes to make sure she arrives at her brownstone.

I let the quiet wrap around me before putting in my earbuds. I pull up theManacledplaylist and scroll to one of my favorite chapters.

Chapter fifty-eight: flashback thirty-three.

I look up at the dilapidated warehouse. The building doesn’t just bleed.

The walls hum with what she did.

What she became.

And me?

I breathe it in like oxygen.

She thinks tonight was a breaking point.

That something inside her snapped and can’t be put back together.

But that’s not what I saw.

I saw evolution.

I saw the first crack of light in all that sunshine she tries to bottle up.

Not a breakdown.

A blooming.

And she doesn’t know it yet, but she’s closer now to me.

To who she really is.

To what we could be. What wewillbe.

But right now, it’s time to clean up after her—scrub away the DNA, the footprints, the fear.

I won’t leave a single thread of her behind for someone else to touch.

Not when every inch of her belongs to me.

Not when this is just the beginning, and I can’t risk anything taking her away from me.

I was going to kill Gannon tonight.

That was the plan. I had it all laid out—routes tracked, blind spots mapped, tools stashed behind a cracked boiler in the corner of this empty alley. He had no idea he was walking into his own grave.

But then... she showed up.

My sunshine. All dressed in black, with that beautiful, unhinged glint in her eye. A knife in her hand. That look on her face.

I couldn’t take it from her.

She needed this. The world took too much already, and tonight... she took something back. Who am I to interrupt that kind of poetry?