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I wipe at my face angrily, but more tears replace the ones I get rid of.

“My God,” I whisper. “You are so fucking selfish.”

The accusation hangs between us.

And for the first time, Tristan looks like he has no defense left at all.

I walk towards him slowly, my eyes never leaving his and stand face to face with him.

“You know what I should do right now?” I ask him. My voice drops into a register that doesn’t sound entirely human—quiet, vibrating with a venomous, unhinged edge that has nothing left to lose. “I should show you exactly what kind of possessive monster you decided to play games with. I should put a bullet right through the center of your skull. Right here.” I jab a rigid, trembling finger against his forehead. “I should tie you to a chair in the basement and skin you alive, layer by agonizing layer, just to see if there’s a real human heart inside you or if it’s just cold, dark rot.”

Tristan doesn’t flinch from my finger. His eyes are fixed on mine, fractured with dark terror. He doesn’t fear the violence, but he sees how completely shattered I am behind it.

“And Jake?” I let out a breathless laugh. “God, what I should do to him. I should drag your precious ex-husband or whatever the hell he is to you now out of his bed by his throat, break every single bone in his hands so he can never touch you again, and leave him bleeding in a gutter. I should kill everyone who made you think you could use me as a fucking joke!”

The manic fury burns so intensely it scorches the air between us, wildly psychotic and violent—the terrifying monster I was bred to be.

And then, just as quickly, the fire dies. The manic grin crumples. The venom drains away, leaving only a gaping, bleeding crater.

“I should do all of that,” I whisper, my voice suddenly small, almost childlike, and completely ruined. “I should tear this city apart until you’re begging me on your knees for mercy. But I don’t… I don’t have any fight left in me, Tristan.”

And for the first time, I let a tear fall freely without wiping it away.

“You drained it all,” I choke out, my ribs aching as if they’ve collapsed inward. “You took everything I had and you handed it right back to him. I’m so fucking tired. I’m exhausted from loving someone who makes me feel like I’m constantly drowning and that’s why I never want to see you again.”

The words are clean and final.

Tristan’s breath catches.

“Fuck, Maksim—”

“We’re done. Whatever this was, whatever I thought it was, is over. Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Don’t show up. Don’t try to explain later when it stops being convenient for you to stay with him.”

I turn around, grab my keys from the counter, and walk straight to the door. My hands are steady somehow. My breathing is not. Every step toward the exit feels like I’m leaving something vital behind in that quiet apartment, something I won’t get back.

I don’t look at him again. And he doesn’t call me back or stop me. I open the door, step into the hallway, and pull it shut behind me with a soft, final click.

I leave the building without remembering how I get to the car. I don’t even remember deciding where to go.

I just drive.

The city blurs past the windows in streaks of early light and concrete. My hands are tight on the wheel, jaw locked so hard it aches.

Every instinct wired into my nervous system is firing at once. That terrifying, familiar surge where mania and agony collide, tipping the world sideways until nothing feels solid.

I want to hit something. A guardrail, a concrete divider, a wall. Anything that will trade this suffocating, emotional pain for real, tactile, physical and bloody pain.

Physical agony has boundaries. It bleeds, it bruises, it eventually goes numb. But this? This feeling that my heart has been hollowed out with a rusty knife and packed with burning lye? I don’t know how to survive this. I’ve never experienced this type of emotional pain before, and my brain is tearing itself apart trying to process the sheer magnitude of it.

He didn’t stop me.

The realization repeats on an endless, sickening loop.

He just stood there. He watched me pack up my shattered dignity, watched me walk toward the door, and he let me turn the handle.

The abandonment doesn’t just hurt; it settles over me like a second skin, freezing cold and suffocating. It’s the very nightmare that has lived at the bottom of my spine since I was a child. The absolute, unshakable terror that the moment someone sees all of me, they will realize I am fundamentally defective and throw me away. And Tristan was supposed to be the exception. I gave him the knife, showed him exactly where the armor was thin, and he drove it in without making a sound.

My vision blurs with hot, stinging tears. I blink them back violently, furious at the weakness, and wrench the wheel to take a sharp turn off the main road.