Page 34 of Gatsby's Starlet
That night never left.
It lived in pieces, the weight of dirt, the pain, the sound of everything collapsing around me, and Jacob’s face above it all, pale and uncertain as he stared down at me like he didn’t know whether he was looking at a man or something already gone.
“Jesus Christ… you’re still breathing.”
I should have been dead before he ever got close enough to say it.
Instead, he dragged me out.
Not out of loyalty, men like Jacob didn’t understand loyalty, but out of instinct, out of that quiet, selfish calculation that told him I might be worth something if I survived, that dragging me out of that grave might buy him favor, protection, a place he hadn’t earned.
Rats didn’t act without reason.
My hand tightened slightly against the window frame as the memory settled in, not loud anymore, not immediate, just something that sat beneath the surface like it had always been there, waiting.
That was the moment everything shifted. Not when Mystic left me in the dirt. Not when the clubhouse burned.
When I woke up somewhere I didn’t belong and didn’t want to be, staring up at white ceilings and clean walls, breathing air that didn’t smell like smoke or blood, surrounded by machinesthat hummed instead of roared, and men who didn’t ask questions because they were paid not to.
And Gabrial.
Standing at the foot of the bed, watching me like he’d already decided what I was worth before I ever opened my eyes. “You can’t die yet. You still owe me.”
I hadn’t answered him.
For weeks, I hadn’t answered anyone, because there was nothing left to say after what I’d done, after the order I’d given, after the fire I’d set in motion with nothing more than a word.
Burn it. Burn it all. Make sure nothing survives. Including her.
For a while, I didn’t fight death, I let it come if it wanted to, let the pain take what it needed, because I had already taken everything that mattered from myself, but death didn’t come, and eventually I stopped waiting for it, stopped caring whether it ever did.
What replaced it wasn’t regret.
It was purpose.
Revenge had a way of keeping a man alive when nothing else could.
Healing took time, and time was something I had always known how to use, something I had never rushed, because patience had never been a weakness of mine, it was the thing that let me survive when others didn’t.
I pushed away from the window and moved across the room, slow and deliberate, the stiffness still there but buried deeper now, not a limitation, not something that slowed me down, just a reminder of what it had taken to get back here.
Because I had gotten back.
Gabrial was gone, his empire fractured like they always were in the end, men like him believing they were untouchable right up until the moment they weren’t, and with him gone there wasnothing left tying me to that bed, to that debt, to anything that had held me in place.
I was back where I belonged, with the Fire Dragons, or what was left of them after everything that had burned and scattered and thinned out into something weaker than it should’ve been, men gone, loyalty stretched thin, nothing left of what had once stood solid except ash and memory, and still I put it back together anyway, piece by piece, quiet and deliberate, without drawing attention to it, because that was how I did everything, controlled, measured, without waste, until the club breathed again the same way I did, not clean, not whole, but alive.
Not everything came back with it.
Some things stayed in that fire.
My gaze drifted back to the window, to the reflection that never quite sat right, and I didn’t need to say her name for it to be there, sitting just beneath the surface where it always was, in the silence, in the space between thoughts, in that moment before sleep when control slipped enough for it to rise whether I allowed it or not.
Zeynep. Dead because of me.
My jaw tightened, the scar pulling harder as it came back, not the pain, but the certainty I’d had when I gave it, when I decided how it would end, because if I couldn’t have her, no one would.
I let it rise just long enough to feel the edge of it again before forcing it back where it belonged, because guilt didn’t change anything, didn’t undo what had been done, didn’t bring anything back, and I had no use for anything that didn’t serve a purpose.
