Page 288 of Ruin Me Gently

My pulse lurched.

It was moving.

Water.

Pooling beneath Clark’s body.

My stomach plummeted.

How the fuck—

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t fucking matter.

I saw him. Foreverythinghe was.

The men in the hostels.

The people who caged me, who kept me trapped, small, afraid.

The ones who looked at me and saw something they could control.

The strangers in the wrong places.

The man who murdered Katie and those girls.

Evelyn.

Wayne.

Every single asshole who had turned every single woman into just another statistic at their own sick hands.

I wasdone.

My heartbeat pounded in my ears in a frenzied, animalistic rhythm that drowned out everything else.

Clark’s body was a wreck—slumped, bloodied, barely human. His lips were swollen, split wide open, water lapping around his ears, seeping across the floorboards, swallowing the edges of his hair. The dark, briny liquid swirled thicker, higher, faster.

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.

Silas mirrored my thoughts, muttering a curse, chest heaving as the realisation slammed into both of us at once.

The yacht was sinking.

His grip closed around my wrist, and he was yanking me back. “We have to go. Now.”

Clark gurgled something, his bloodied mouth barely forming words, but I didn’t stop to listen. I didn’t care.

He had wrecked me. He had wrecked Silas. He had nearly wreckedus.

My feet were unsteady beneath me, the whole world pitching and tilting as the water rushed in, creeping higher against my ankles.

Silas tugged me, his free hand bracing against the shifting walls as he half-dragged me through the boat. I stumbled, fingers gripping him tight as we reached the door, the jagged wood splintered from where Silas had kicked it open. The cold air slapped against my face as a storm raged—howling winds, sheets of rain hammering the docks, the ocean a restless, churning void beneath us.

Of fucking course it was storming.

Why did it always storm here?

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