Page 43 of Bound By Threads
Roman
She’s alive.
The words play on a loop in my head like a fucking curse, a cruel joke the universe decided to play now I’m so close to taking down my dad. Every breath since last night has felt like a fucking lie.
I watched her dance—no,perform—like she hadn’t torn the souls out of us all.
Scarlett… no Siren.
Fitting name for a girl who was always too goddamn good at luring people in and leaving them wrecked.
I don’t remember driving home last night. Don’t remember anything past the flicker of the stage lights and the way her eyes locked on ours for the briefest of seconds—wild, wary, and full of pain and panic. I felt that stare like a knife to my chest.
She saw us, and she didn’t stop dancing until the music stopped, and then she fled.
Fled from us.
Now the sun’s up, but it somehow feels like the darkest day of my life. I shove open the door to Crew’s room in our dorm, and the stench of smoke and something else hits me like a wall. My shoes are muffled by the carpet littered with empty bottles and burnt-out joints. The black curtains are drawn tight, but it’s bright enough to see the outline of Crew’s body sprawled across the couch, shirtless, one arm dangling over the side like a forgotten puppet.
“Get the fuck up,” I growl, nudging his hand with my foot. He doesn’t move, and my jaw tightens as I stalk forward. I would be concerned he OD’d if his chest wasn’t moving. “Crew!”
Still nothing. I grab his shoulder and shake him—hard.
His eyes crack open, red-rimmed and hazy like he doesn’t know who’s standing over him. Then he flinches. “Roman?” he croaks.
“Yeah, it’s me. Congratulations, Crew, you’ve officially reached rock bottom.” My voice is pure venom, sharp and cold. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You said you were sober.”
He groans and rolls over, pulling a pillow onto his face. “She’s alive,” he mumbles from beneath it, and I have to resist the urge to press it down until he suffocates.
“And?”
“She was right there,” he says, voice breaking. “On that stage. Dancing like none of it ever happened. Like we didn’tmournher, Roman. She ran… like we didn’t lose our fucking minds thinking she was dead.”
I yank the pillow off his face and throw it across the room. “You’re high again.”
His jaw clenches. He sits up, barely, resting his elbows on his knees. “Don’t start, Roman.”
“Don’t start?” I scoff, tamping down my anger so I don’t start shouting at him. I pace the room like a caged animal. “You OD’d three months ago, and you’re telling me not to start. You promised you were done, and here you are high as fuck because of that bitch.”
“She was dead!” he shouts. “I thought she was dead! We all did. You might not care, but I’ve been walking around half-alive since we found out, and the drugs were the only way I was going to survive the cavern she left in my chest where my heart should’ve been. So yeah, I’m high because she’s out there acting like none of it ever happened.”
His voice cracks, and I stop moving. There’s silence for a moment—only the sound of his ragged breathing and my pulse pounding in my ears.
“She left,” I say. “That’s it. You need to get over her.”
Crew’s voice becomes so quiet it’s basically a whisper. “She became someone else.”
And I think that’s what guts us all the most.
Scarlett—the girl who used to hum off-key while doing homework at my dining table, the one who cried when we would accidentally step on a snail and wore mismatched socks—is now Siren, who works at a fucking strip club.
A dancer. A siren. A ghost in stilettos.
“You think she’s doing it for the money?” I ask, trying to keep my tone nonchalant as if I don’t care. “Or is she doing it to prove something?”
Crew’s silence is answer enough. I scrub a hand over my face. “Where’s Elijah?”
Crew shrugs. “Didn’t come back.”
