Page 155 of Ruin My Life
I planned for this. I’vealwaysplanned for this. Ever since I made that deal with Matthias O’Doyle, I’ve been building exit strategies—safehouses scattered outside the city, all under fake names, bought with untraceable cash.
My people are already out. Scattered. Safe.
But I’m still here.
Because I’m not leaving without Brie.
And maybe that makes me an idiot. Maybe Monroe was right to question me. Maybe Connor was right to challenge me.
She may have pulled the trigger. But I built the gun.
This war didn’t start with her.
It started with me.
Lee sent me the address to her family’s house—a place I didn’t even know she still owned. But she kept it in her name all this time.
There’s got to be a reason for that.
It’s the last place left to check.
I pull into a curved driveway in front of a house that looks like it once belonged on the cover of a luxury magazine. Now, it looks forgotten. Like the walls themselves are grieving.
The lawn is overgrown, blades of grass pushing through the cracks in the stone path. The garden’s full of dead roses—brittle, browned, and glazed in a thin layer of frost. The windows are veiled in grime.
There are no lights on inside. It doesn’t give me much hope.
The whole place looks… abandoned. Like time moved on and the house didn’t know how to follow.
Still, I park. Get out. Walk up the steps.
The front door is ajar, and it creaks when I push it open.
Inside, the air is stale. Heavy. Void of the kind of life a house should always hold. The light hardwood floors have lost their shine, and rust-coloured dirt has settled in the grain by the door—
I freeze.
No. Not dirt.
Blood.
Old, dried blood.
“Brie?” I call softly.
My voice doesn’t echo. It just disappears into the silence like the house has swallowed it whole.
I step over the discoloured floorboards, as if disturbing them might wake the ghosts still lingering inside. The same quiet that seemed to swallow the sound of my voice simultaneously amplifies everything else—the creak of my shoes, the beat of my pulse—as I move into the living room.
Cream-coloured carpet. White sectional. Wide bay windows casting pale light across the space. Another rust-coloured stain mares the carpet just behind the couch. Faded, like someone tried to clean it.
But you can’t scrub out trauma. Not really. Not from a place like this.
“Brie—”
I round the couch and stop cold.
She’s on the floor. Lying on her back—on top of another large stain in the carpet.
