Page 172 of Shots & Echoes

I stepped closer, invading her space like a last-ditch effort to get her to crack, to give up before I did. Before I folded under the weight of my own bullshit. But instead of breaking, she squared her shoulders and held her ground.

Goddamn her.

“I don’t love you, Iris. You were a distraction. That’s all.”

I didn’t recognize my own voice—low, rough, like something dying inside me.

Her lip trembled, and for a second, I thought I had done it—I thought I had shattered whatever was left between us. But then she blinked, and the heartbreak melted into something else.

Fire.

Pure, unfiltered rage.

“I thought you were a lot of things, Callahan,” she said, voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. She swiped at a stray tear and let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “But a coward? Didn’t expect that.”

The words knocked the air from my lungs.

Because that was it. The truth wrapped in razor wire. I was a coward, standing here pretending I could stomach watching her walk away when all I wanted to do was beg her to stay.

The space between us was suffocating, charged with everything we weren’t saying. I needed her to leave. I needed her not to push, because if she did—if she so much as whispered my name in that broken way she did when I kissed her too hard—I’d fucking lose it.

I’d tell her everything.

I flinched—barely—but she saw it.

Because she always saw me. She saw past the rough edges, the bravado, the carefully constructed armor. And that was why this hurt like hell.

Iris stood her ground, fire burning in her eyes, but I could see the cracks beneath it. See the way her hands trembled at her sides, fists clenched so tight her knuckles went white. Her voice was sharp, cutting, but fragile in a way that made my stomach twist.

“If you walk away from this, from me—you’ll regret it. But that’s on you. Not me.”

The words hit like a gut punch, harder than any hit I’d ever taken on the ice. My body screamed at me to fix this, to fucking fight for her, but I couldn’t. I had already committed to this path—to saving her the only way I knew how.

I forced my face into a mask, blank and indifferent, even as my chest caved in on itself.

“You’ll thank me one day,” I lied. The words tasted like ash in my mouth, hollow and bitter.

She shook her head—slow, deliberate—like she already knew I was full of shit. And maybe she did. Maybe she saw through me like she always did, straight to the part of me that was desperate to chase after her, to take it all back before it was too late.

But she didn’t fight.

She didn’t beg.

She just looked at me like I was nothing. Like I wasn’t worth it. And somehow, that hurt worse than if she had screamed.

She turned.

One step. Then another.

The sound of her shoes against the tile was deafening. I stood frozen, every inch of me screaming to stop her, to grab her wrist, to make her listen. But I didn’t. I let her walk away.

And when the door clicked shut behind her, it felt final.

The silence that followed was suffocating. The kind that settled deep into my bones, pressing down like a weight I couldn’t shake. My fingers curled against the edge of my desk—the same desk where I had touched her, kissed her, made her mine.

Now she was gone.

And all I could do was stare at the empty space where she had just stood, hating myself for letting her go, hating the way my heart still beat for her despite everything I had done.

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