KIERAN’S POV
I stood, frozen, watching Sera’s retreating figure until the sway of her hair and the measured lift of her shoulders disappeared behind the arch of the park entrance.
The ache in my chest wasn’t a sharp stab—it was the slow, gnawing kind that crept in and hollowed everything out.
It was pain, yes, but pain I couldn’t quite qualify.
The cruelest part was that it shouldn’t have hurt—not when she had made it clear again and again that there was no room for me in her world.
And after that phone call the night I let myself have a little too much to drink, after Lucian’s curt voice came down the line, practically telling me to fuck off and stop disrupting their time together, I realized: there was no going back for us.
If there had even been a ‘back’ in the first place.
Perhaps that was what haunted me the most—the realization that Sera and I had never truly had a past together. Not one worth holding onto, at least.
