Maybe it was meant to protect me.
But now?
Now it just feels like a cage wrapped in ribbons.
When did we move to Korea?
How old was I when I really met Gaia?
Every journal reads like a puzzle missing just enough pieces to make me question my own mind. No page picks up where the last one ends. Each one drags me deeper into a timeline someone deliberately scrambled. Maybe on purpose. Maybe to keep me from ever knowing the full truth.
I should be angry. But all I feel is hollow.
Lying back in the bed I now share with Wyck, the one place I thought I could pretend to feel safe, I shut my eyes and try to conjure her face.
The woman I calledMom. The man I thought wasDad.
Both dead. Both liars. And yet… still mine. How fucked is that?
I want to reach out to Josie… or Kaia… or whoever the hell she is. Same with Gaia. But I can’t. Not yet.
Their names still taste like ash in my mouth.
Their calls go straight to voicemail now. I made sure of that. I needed space before I burned the whole goddamn house down.
The door creaks. Footsteps follow. I tense… until I hear his voice. Low. Laced in lazy amusement. “You look like you’re about to crawl out of your own skin.”
Dash.
I push up on my elbows, roll onto my back, and find him watching me with those sharp, impossibly green eyes.There’s brown swirled in them, just enough to remind you he’s dangerous beneath the pretty.
He’s the youngest of the Devils, but don’t let that fool you. There’s something twisted hiding in his softness. A wolf draped in silk.
“Just reading,” I mumble, flicking my fingers at the closed journal like it didn’t just gut me.
He walks over, sits beside me on the bed like he owns it, and maybe, just maybe, he does. At least for now.
“Learn anything useful?” he asks, casual, like we’re swapping gossip and not unraveling a legacy of betrayal.
I laugh. It sounds broken. “Apparently, I always noticed I didn’t look like my parents. My mom, Kaia, I guess, told me it was just my mind playing tricks on me.” I shake my head. “But that was bullshit too, wasn’t it?”
He doesn’t flinch. Just nods slowly. “They lied, yeah. But they loved you in their own way. People do fucked-up things when they think it’s the only way to keep you safe.”
“Is that supposed to make it easier to swallow?” I snap. “I just want to knowwhy, Dash. Why the lies? Was it because Josie killed my father? Or is there something worse waiting at the bottom of this?”
He exhales through his nose. “I don’t have that answer yet, Pumpkin. But we’re digging.”
He stands, then pauses, eyes on me like he’s weighing the cost of what comes next. “You don’t have to carry the weight of this. Let us handle the dirt.”
“Don’t do that,” I bark. “Don’t protect me with half-truths like they did.”
That gets his attention. He turns slowly, steps back toward the bed.
“There’s nothing good waiting at the end of this story, Athens,” he says, voice velvet-wrapped steel. “But if you want it bad enough, we’ll rip it out of someone.”
He drops down beside me again, close enough that his presence burns through the chill still wrapped around my spine. His hand finds my face, soft, warm, far too gentle for someone who’s helped bury bodies.
“I want to kiss you,” he murmurs. “May I?”
