The rain didn’t stop. And neither did I. Because when you lose the last person who ever loved you... you don't come back.
You rot with them.
---
I don’t remember how they dragged me back to the estate. One minute I was screaming in the rain, digging through wet ash, and the next, I was slipping in and out of blackness. My body was shot. Fever. Blood loss. Trauma. My mind wasn’t even fighting anymore. I collapsed the moment we reached the gates. I didn’t get back up after that.
Days passed. Maybe weeks. I don’t know. The world around me turned silent. Numb. Blurry. The only one who came near was the housekeeper. Quiet woman who didn’t ask questions. Just wiped my face, changed my clothes, and helped me sit up when I needed to swallow pills.
But someone else came.
My little brother. Aziel.
“Harmony,” he whispered, “you’re hurting again.”
I blinked into the darkness, throat raw.
“Why always hurting?” he mumbled. “I want… I want us to go. Far. We can live… somewhere with trees. You and me… I don’t like this place.”
I turned just enough to hold him. Weakly. Barely. But enough. He wiped his nose on my sleeve and tried to smile.
“I’ll save money, okay? I’ll save a lot. And we run away. You and me. We go. Like magic.”
My lips parted. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to promise him that soon, very soon, we’d be free. But all I could do was hold him tighter and whisper, “I’m trying, Z. I swear I’m trying.”
He nodded against me. Then he fell asleep in my arms.
The only safe thing I had left.
And Hakeem? He was gone.
He was off somewhere across the world with Margaret, the woman who faked her death and came back acting like the universe owed her every stolen minute.
Photos of them were everywhere. Posing by the river in Paris. Locked together at the Louvre. Wrapped up in each other in some icy blue cave in goddamn Antarctica.
America’s most feared heir and his first love, back from the dead.
I stared at those photos until the sting in my chest faded into something colder. Until it stopped hurting. And that’s when I started peeling away the memories. One piece at a time.
The way he held me when I cried. The time he killed a man for brushing my arm at a party.
The island he shut down on my birthday just to watch me smile.
All of it—gone.
---
Then one morning, they came back.
No announcement. No warning.