Page 298 of Ruin Me Gently

“Clark…” I started, then stopped. The words hitched in my throat, thick and sticky like tar. “We found him,” I muttered eventually. “We… The yacht started sinking… and I couldn’t—” I shook my head, swallowing hard. “I couldn’t leave him there.”

“Jesus,” he muttered.

I opened my mouth to say something else, but footsteps creaked down the hall, slow and heavy.

I turned just as Silas filled the doorway. “Yeah,” he muttered. “She let him live.”

I stiffened. “Oh, here we go again.”

His laugh was cold and humourless. “Yeah,” he shot back. “Here we fucking go.”

“Silas,” Finn warned, voice tight. His gaze flicked between us. “What the hell do you think you’re doing talking to her like that, man?”

“I’m not doing this with you,” I snapped at Silas.

But I knew better.

We were definitely doing this.

“Why not?” Silas shot back, his voice rough and splintered like something that had been cracked too many times to stay whole. “Because you know I’m right? Because you know he should be dead right now? Because you fu—”

“For the love of God, Silas, I understand you’re angry right now, but would you just shut your mouth and let me talk for five goddamn minutes? Then I’ll tell you why I wanted him to live!”

Finn cleared his throat from the corner. “Uh… should I leave?”

“No,” I shouted out before Silas could answer. I ran a shaky hand down my face, dragging in a breath that didn’t do a damn thing to steady me. “It’s fine, Finn. You can stay if you want. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Finn’s eyebrows shot up and he leaned against the wall, arms crossed tight over his chest, his expression settling somewhere between‘I’m staying out of this’and‘I swear to God, don’t break my house.’

Silas didn’t move. He just stood there, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles had gone stark white. His breathing was sharp, uneven, like every inhale barely held him together. But his eyes stayed locked on me, burning and furious, waiting for me to say something that would give him an excuse to blow.

“Well?” he said. “I’m listening.”

I didn’t want to do this.

God, Ireallydidn’t want to do this.

My head felt too full, like the air itself was suffocating me, like the walls were about two seconds from caving in. My pulse pounded in my ears, fast and frantic, and my ribs felt too tight, like my lungs were fighting for space they couldn’t have.

“I told you earlier,” I muttered. “Dead people can’t suffer.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he snapped.

“If he dies,” I said slowly, “it’s over. He’s gone. That’s it. No more consequences. No more fallout. No more anything. But leaving him to live?” My breath hitched. “That means he has to wake up every single day knowing what he’s done.”

“He doesn’tgive a fuck about what he did to you, Lilith,” he said, voice cold and hard. “He won’t suffer for anything.”

“No,” I shot back. “But he has to live with the fact that he’s nothing now. Knowing that his whole life—his career, his name, his reputation—all of it’s gone. He has to live with the fact that he destroyed himself. That he’s a washed up, bitter has-been who torched everything good in his life, because he couldn’t pull his head out of his own ass long enough to stop being such a miserable, abusive piece of shit.”

The words spilled out too fast. Quick, messy, and mean. Too sharp-edged to grip onto.

“He lost everything,” I bit out. “And now he gets to choke on that for the rest of his life. Every single day.”

Silas’ jaw flexed, but he didn’t speak.

“What about when he comes to visit you in your sleep?” The words splintered out of my throat. “What about when he’s standing at the end of your bed? What about when you have to live with the choice of killing him for the rest of your life?”

My voice cracked on that last word, and I hated how raw it sounded. How scared.

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