Prologue
Elves
The cameras clicked like insects—sharp, rhythmic, impossible to ignore. I could feel their attention crawling over me, waiting for a single misstep, a single word I couldn’t take back.
They all wanted one thing: a statement. An answer. A headline.
About him and me.
I wanted to tell them the truth. Keeping secrets always felt unbearable—like static in my head that refused to fade. But truth came with consequences, and my mind wouldn’t stop mapping them out. Every possibility, every reaction, every ruinous outcome unfolded in perfect detail before I even spoke.
And every version ended with him getting hurt.
So I stayed quiet. Logic told me it was the only way to limit the damage. Emotion called it cowardice. The two fought constantly inside my skull.
The press room was hummed with noise. The lights were too bright, the microphones too close, the mix of perfume and sweat clinging to the air until it turned suffocating. I’d counted my breaths to stay grounded—one, two, three—but even that hadn’t helped for long. My focus fractured under the weight of it all.
Their faces blurred together—too many micro-expressions, too many shifting cues. My brain tried to catalog them all, to make sense of the social noise, but it was too much. So I simplified it the only way I knew how: they’re waiting for blood.
My jaw locked. I could feel the muscle twitch. I wanted to tell them to stop—to leave him out of it, to stop twisting what they didn’t understand—but professionalism had been burned into me too deeply. It was my structure, my safety net.
For years, I’d built my career on discipline and precision, avoiding scandal, perfecting every gesture, every word. It had always worked. Structure made the world manageable.
But that day, everything had come apart. Because Kane changed the equation. And suddenly, my name, my image, all of it—none of it mattered. Only him.
Do it for him, I’d told myself.
My pulse had thudded like a cue I couldn’t miss.
And then the door burst open.
Kane walked in like a storm—unbothered, steady, magnetic. The cameras spun toward him in a blur of flashes and gasps, but he hadn’t even looked at them. He walked straight to me.
Then he took my hand. Pulled me to my feet. The air had vanished.
“If you’re going to hell,” he murmured, voice low and steady, “I’m coming with you.”
My breath caught.
“You’ll regret this,” I whispered, because logic demanded the warning.
He smiled—small, defiant. “Since when have I cared about consequences?”
Then his hands framed my face, and the world narrowed to heat and heartbeat and the startling realization that he meant every word.
He kissed me—hard, certain, unapologetic. The room erupted, but I hadn’t heard a thing. All the noise collapsed into something bright and weightless.
I kissed him back because it was the only truth I left to give.
And somewhere, behind the thunder of cameras and the chaos we’d just ignited, one thought burned through me—quiet but absolute:
Please, don’t regret this. Because if you do, I won’t know how to recover.
