Page 255 of Ruin My Life

Just a fraud playing god in a kingdom built on ash.

Maybe that’s what this is. My punishment. My curse.

Every good thing I touch rots. Slips through my fingers like sand. No matter how tightly I grip—how desperately I hold on—it always slips away.

She’sslipping away.

No matter how I beg, how I rage, how I pray—she keeps slipping.

God, I want to go back.

Back to the back room of The Speakeasy. Back to her tiny apartment. Back to my condo.

Back to that battered SUV, the cracked leather seat that still smells like her shampoo.

Back to her parents’ old living room. Back to my mother’s safehouse on the cliffs.

Back to the porch. The bathroom. The bed.

If I could just go back to that bed—hold her there a little longer. Alifetimelonger.

But even forever wouldn’t be enough.

Not for her. Not forus.

My eyes burn.

Not from grief, but from fury.

From the helpless, bone-deep rage that curdles into desperation when there’s nothing left to fight.

I lean in and press my forehead to hers, squeezing my eyes shut until the pressure aches behind them.

She smells like antiseptic. Like smoke and hospital sheets. Like the days I’ve spent watching her fade away in a place that feels more graveyard than recovery.

But underneath it all—beneath the blood, the fire, the fear—

She still smells likeroses.

My little rose…

A rogue tear slips from the inner corner of my eye. It trails down the side of my nose—slow, silent—and lands against her lips.

The first tear I’ve shed in years.

I didn’t cry when I found Isabella dead. Didn’t cry when I moved my mother across state lines, not knowing if I’d ever see her again. Didn’t cry standing at the graves of people I loved.

I’d taught myself early in life to be strong. To bury the softness. To never let weakness show—because weakness is blood in the water, and the sharks never sleep.

But Brie…

Brie has been my weakness since the moment she hacked into my network and made me chase her ghost through the code.

So it’s fitting that she be the one to break me open.

A whisper-soft touch brushes my jaw. So light it feels like breath.

“A tear from the King of Kings…”