Page 5 of Inevitable Endings
My breathing is slow, controlled, even as fury builds beneath the surface. My fingers twitch, itching for the feel of a weapon, for the weight of a gun, a blade, anything to cut this bastard apart piece by piece. My nails dig into my palm, the pain grounding me in the moment.
Nick steps closer again, the toe of his polished boot nudging against my ribs. “She’s a weakness, you know,” he murmurs. “And I love exploiting weaknesses, especially against men like you. A man who I never thought would have one.”
Silence stretches between us. He wants me to speak, to lash out, to give him something.
Instead, I let out a slow, ragged breath, my lips curling into a bloodied smirk. My tongue swipes across my teeth, the metallic taste of iron thick on my tongue.
Nick believes he has won. He thinks this is the end.
But he doesn’t understand what he has started.
This is not my ending.
It will be his. An inevitable conclusion written in blood.
A hoarse chuckle escapes my throat, raw and taunting. My voice is barely above a whisper, but it carries enough weight to make him pause.
“You’ve already made your first mistake.”
Nick raises an eyebrow, though I can’t see it, I can hear the curiosity in his silence. “And what’s that?”
I force a grin, my cracked lips splitting further. My voice is quiet, but it is laced with something deadly.
“You let me live.”
Chapter 2
Tears for the Beast
Isabella
No one can truly explain why we cry, why eyes meant for sight overflow with feeling. Tears shouldn’t answer to the heart, but they do, spilling over when words are not enough. Maybe it’s how we keep the wild in us from breaking free, how we let the beast inside ache without losing ourselves. Because inside me, something raw and restless stirs, snarling, reaching, calling for him, for Aslanov. I have tried to silence it, to starve it, but it lives. It lives for his touch.
I have learned over time that love is stronger than death. If you love someone, they can never really die. They live on in your mind, soul, and everything you do.
And so does he.
I sit at my desk in the dimly lit office, the city lights beyond the window blurred by the steady downpour. My white coat hangs over the back of my chair, forgotten, the fabric still heavy with the scent of antiseptic and exhaustion. The clinic is quiet now, the last patient discharged hours ago. Only the hum of the late-night city filters in through the cracks, a distant siren, the rhythmic pulse of rain against glass.
My hands hover over the patient files spread out in front of me, but I’m not really seeing them. My thoughts slip through my fingers, circling the same place they always do, back to him.
Two months. It’s been two months since they declared Aslanovdead. A breakout in an underground prison facility, a riot, a body found among the wreckage. Burned beyond recognition. Identified only by what little remained of him. I remember staring at the report in disbelief, unable to reconcile the finality of it. Aslanov, erased, gone. Just like that.
I spent years piecing people back together as a nurse, saving lives others had tried to take. When I joined Aslanov to Moscow, after Trevor’s shooting, Ada quitted her job. The department fell apart, officers were dismissed, and whatever faith she had left in the system crumbled with it. She walked away. No more government work. No more pretending the badge meant anything to her. She knew I was with him, she knew Aslanov shot Trevor. Yet she was bound to a contract which forced her to stay silent.
That’s how Ada ended up here; at a clinic for the forgotten, the ones with bullet wounds they can’t explain, the ones with broken ribs and empty eyes, the ones who carry ghosts like we do. She patches them up as best as she can, sends them back out, watches them vanish into the night.
And now, I’ve joined the clinic too. It’s not the future I imagined exactly, but it’s mine. I spend my days and nights alongside Ada, helping treat the forgotten, the broken, the ones who don’t ask questions and can’t afford answers.
After his arrest, when the grief became unbearable, the old forgotten textbooks offered a kind of silence my mind couldn’t find anywhere else. I began studying again, obsessively. Not for grades, not for degrees, just to keep from falling apart. Each page I turned felt like reclaiming a piece of who I used to be.
Ada saw that. And when the clinic needed more hands, she brought me in, not as a licensed physician, not yet, but as someone who knew enough and had the will to learn the rest. I work under supervision: former combat medics, trauma nurses, ex-paramedics who’ve seen more blood than any textbook canprepare you for. They trust me. I earn it every day.
Another pair of hands, another lifeline for the damned. Maybe this place is what we all need: a reason to keep going, even when the past won’t let us go. A machine I built to keep myself moving forward.
But nothing feels real anymore. Not without him.
The door creaks open, and I glance up to see Ada standing there, her arms crossed, her hair loose around her tired face. She’s always here, working beside me, keeping this place running when I can’t. She has her own past, her own debts, but she never talks about them.
