VOLUME II ACT II CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: THE BOMBSHELL (Part Ten)
VOLUME II ACT II CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: THE BOMBSHELL (Part Ten)
VOLUME II
ACT II
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: THE BOMBSHELL
(Part Ten)
Alina
The silence was the loudest thing in the room.
Kieran’s words were still ringing inside me like broken glass tumbling down a stairwell, shards catching every nerve as they fell. The confession. The baby. The life I never knew about, a life he had kept tucked away while I was unraveling myself for him.
And I had said it, I had told him I knew.
The air between us was dense with everything unspoken, yet neither of us moved. He leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, his profile cast in shadow, while I sat on the edge of the bed with my fists gripping the blanket like it could anchor me.
“I knew,” I whispered again, as though repeating it would make me braver.
His head tilted, his eyes slicing toward me like sharp knives under dim light. “Since when?”
There it was, the demand, the interrogation I had dreaded but expected.
I swallowed, my throat sandpaper. “Since Celeste.”
Her name tasted bitter. A stranger who had shown me the truth when he couldn’t. A woman whose voice still echoed in my memory, telling me the kind of man Kieran really was.
Kieran straightened, his jaw working. “You went digging.”
“I didn’t have to dig,” I shot back, my voice breaking. “She came to me. She wanted me to know who you really were. And I” my chest caved in on itself “I believed her. Because deep down I already knew you were hiding something.”
His silence pressed down on me, suffocating. His nostrils flared once, his body taut with tension like he could lunge at the truth and strangle it if he wanted to.
“You should’ve come to me,” he said finally, his tone laced with accusation, but beneath it was a tremor I recognized, fear.
I laughed, but it came out cracked. “Come to you? Kieran, you disappear when I ask the simplest questions. You freeze me out when I need warmth. You hold me like I’m yours, but you live like you’ve already given yourself away. How was I supposed to come to you when you’ve never let me in?”
The words spilled out, my chest heaving. They were years’ worth of swallowed questions, every time I had silenced myself to keep him close. And now they poured out like floodwater.
His eyes flickered, betraying something, guilt? Pain? Regret? But it was gone as fast as it appeared.
“You think I didn’t want to tell you?” His voice sharpened. “You think I wanted you to find out like this? I was protecting you.”
“From what?” I demanded, standing so fast the blanket fell away. “From the truth? From knowing you had a whole life, people, responsibilities, before me? From realizing I was just another chapter in your endless pattern?”
He flinched at that. Not visibly, but I knew him well enough to notice the way his throat bobbed, the way his knuckles pressed harder against his arms.
“You don’t understand,” he muttered.
“Then make me understand!” I screamed, my voice ricocheting off the walls. “Because I’ve spent years trying to read between your silences, piecing together fragments, excusing the lies, and all I’ve gotten is this” my hand gestured wildly between us “—this bomb that blows everything to hell.”
His mask cracked then, just slightly. His shoulders sagged, his mouth parting like he was about to tell me the thing he never had. But then—he shook his head, retreating into himself again.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said flatly.
My chest collapsed. “It matters to me.”
Silence again. The kind of silence that didn’t heal but severed, sharp as a blade.
And then it hit me, the finality. He wasn’t going to give me more. He wasn’t going to explain, or beg, or stitch the wound shut. He had detonated the bomb, and now he was leaving me with the ruins.
I felt my knees weaken, but I stayed standing, forcing steel into my spine. “I loved you,” I whispered. “I loved you more than my sanity, more than my safety, more than my life. And you, you gave me a ghost version of yourself. A man who showed up just enough to keep me chained while hiding a whole world behind my back.”
Kieran’s throat worked again. His hands, the ones I had kissed a thousand times, curled into fists at his sides. His eyes—those eyes that once saw me like no one else ever had, looked everywhere but at me.
Finally, he turned his gaze on me, and it was hollow.
“You shouldn’t have loved me,” he said quietly.
The final nail.
It landed in my chest with brutal precision.
Tears blurred my vision, but I refused to let them fall, not here, not now, not in front of him. I had bled enough for him already.
“You’re right,” I said, my voice steady despite the quake inside me. “I shouldn’t have.”
And then, I walked away.
Out of the bedroom, down the narrow hall, past the life we had pretended was ours. My legs shook, but I didn’t stop. My hand grabbed the doorknob, my body surging with the last ounce of defiance I had left.
Behind me, silence. No footsteps. No voice calling my name. Nothing.
I opened the door, and the night air hit me, cold, biting, alive.
For the first time in years, I wasn’t walking toward him. I was walking away.
And though it hurt so much I could barely breathe, somewhere beneath the wreckage was a seed of something I hadn’t felt in years.
Freedom.