Page 62 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
My body moves like it remembers something my brain can't accept.
I turn, pushing out of the club, through the stone archway, and into the street.
The sky above is blinding, the kind of flat gray that presses too close, too low.
I fish my phone from my jacket.
Call log. No answer. No messages.
She was just here.
Just in my bed.
Just in my arms.
Her skin against mine.
Her laugh like silk wrapped in fire.
The way her eyes cut through every wall I'd spent a lifetime building.
She told me there was someone her family wanted her to marry.
She asked me where I stood.
I touched her like I had the right.
And now they're saying she's gone.
"Bullshit," I mutter under my breath, gripping the phone so tight my knuckles crack.
I stare down at my screen again, then press dial.
It rings once. Then again. Then goes straight to voicemail.
I try once more, then again, and again, each attempt more frantic than the last, until my hands are shaking and sweat beads at the back of my neck, my pulse thundering so loudly I can hardly hear the silence on the other end.
It is not just silence.
It is absence.
It is the kind of void that swallows everything, the kind that tells you with no uncertainty that whatever you lost is not coming back.
I stand there with the phone in my hand, every muscle in my body tight with dread, like something inside me is clawing to get out.
My breath comes shallow and hard, too loud in the stillness of the room, and I feel it then—that creeping, gutting truth that I am too late.
My throat closes, heat rising so fast it blinds me.
I stagger back, bracing a hand on the wall like I need something solid to remind me I'm still standing. "I didn't get to say I loved her," I whisper, but the sound of it feels wrong in my mouth, too small, too useless, too late.
The words fall flat against the polished stone beneath my boots, and I say them again, louder this time, harsher, because maybe if I keep saying it, the past will change.
But nothing does. No one answers. No voice comes over the line to tell me I'm wrong.
There's only that same silence, that same stillness, and it feels like punishment.
I didn't get to say I loved her. I didn't get to say I loved her.
