He Won’t Let Me Go

Chapter 1: She Broke Her Promise

MALACHI’S POV

“Come on, Malachi.”

“No.”

Ivy frowned at me.

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“I thought about it yesterday.”

“And?”

“And the answer was still no.”

She folded her arms. “You’re scared.”

“I am not scared.”

“You are.”

“Ivy.”

I glanced past her at the abandoned building beyond the rusted fence …. broken windows, cracked walls, weeds swallowing the path.

“That building is condemned. We’re not supposed to go inside.”

“That’s exactly why we should.”

“You make no sense.”

“Come on.” She grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward the gap in the fence.

We squeezed through together, and once inside, the fear cracked into something lighter. Ivy ducked behind a fallen pillar, peeking out, daring me.

“Bet you can’t catch me.”

“Ivy, this is a bad idea.”

“Catch me first.”

I lunged. Missed. Stumbled into a cloud of dust, and Ivy laughed so hard she had to lean against the wall to breathe.

“That was pathetic.”

“Shut up.” My face went warm. I looked away before she could notice.

“Are you blushing?”

“No.”

“You so are.”

“Ivy….”

The floor groaned beneath us, low and deep, like the building itself was exhaling.

“…did you hear that?”

“Malachi?”

“Don’t move.”

The crack came again, sharper, closer. Dust sifted down like snow.

“Malachi, I’m scared.”

“Run!”

The ceiling gave way in a roar of concrete and twisted metal. Ivy screamed as a beam slammed down, tearing our hands apart.

“IVY!”

“Malachi!”

“Where are you?”

“I’m stuck …. my leg, I can’t move it!”

“I’m coming, don’t move!”

I crawled through the wreckage on my hands and knees, choking on dust, until I found her pinned beneath a slab. I pulled until my hands bled, until she came free, and together we dragged ourselves toward a gap where sunlight cut through the dark.

“You go first.”

“No, you….”

“Go, Ivy!”

“Promise you’re right behind me.”

“I promise.”

She went. Then I was alone …. a slab crushing down across my legs, unable to move, unable to do anything but scream into the ringing silence.

“Ivy? Ivy, please….”

Nothing.

Hours passed like that, in the dark, in the pain, my voice giving out, my body going numb and then screaming awake again. I was certain I would die there. Then …. footsteps. Not Ivy’s.

“Malachi!”

“…Mom?”

“I’m here, baby, I’m here. Hold on.”

She wedged a fallen slab beneath the beam, arms shaking, straining with a sound that didn’t seem human.

“Mom, it’s too heavy, leave it….”

“Move, Malachi. NOW.”

“I’m not leaving you!”

“MOVE!”

I crawled free. I turned back for her anyway.

“Mom, come on, we can still….”

“Run, baby….”

“MOM!”

“I love….”

The wall came down between us, and her voice was simply gone.

“MOM! NO …. MOM!”

Someone dragged me backward through the opening, clawing, screaming her name into the dust until my voice broke apart entirely.

-----

Eighteen years later, I would still remember the collapse.

I would remember my mother’s voice. I would remember Ivy’s promise. And most of all, I would remember waiting for her to come back.

She never did.

At least, that was what I believed.

I woke the way I always did …. gasping, one hand at my own throat, the dream already dissolving into fragments of dust and her voice calling my name until it wasn’t calling anymore. I didn’t sleep after that. I never did.

“Malachi…” Her voice always lingered a few seconds after I opened my eyes, soft and wrong, curling at the edges. “You left me to die.”

“You’re not real,” I said to the empty room, the same thing I said every morning, like a man arguing with a ghost I refused to believe in and couldn’t stop hearing anyway.

The penthouse was silent around me, forty floors above a city that never stopped moving. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, elbows on my knees, staring at nothing.

“I love y….”

The words cut off in my memory exactly the way they had eighteen years ago, and I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes until the sound stopped.

“Enough,” I muttered. “Enough.”

By morning there were bags carved so deep under my eyes they looked bruised, and a glass of beer sat forgotten in my hand, three fingers deep and untouched since 4 a.m. I looked like a man who hadn’t slept in years, because I hadn’t …. not really. Not since the dust settled and my mother didn’t walk out of it.

I stood at the window of my office an hour later, the city spread out beneath me like something I owned but didn’t particularly want. And in a sense, I did own most of it. Cross Industries had swallowed three competitors in the last two years alone. People called me a visionary. A shark. The youngest billionaire the country had produced in a decade.

None of it meant anything at four in the morning.

“You should sleep, sir,” my housekeeper had told me once, years ago, before I’d let most of the household staff go and kept only the ones who knew not to ask questions.

“I sleep fine,” I’d told her.

That had been a lie then. It was still a lie now.

I thought sometimes about the boy I’d been before the building came down …. a boy who blushed when the redhead girl he had a crush on teased him, who laughed until he couldn’t breathe, who didn’t know yet what it felt like to watch someone die in slow motion and be powerless to stop it. That boy was gone. In his place was a man who built empires because empires didn’t ask him how he was feeling, didn’t need him to be soft, didn’t remind him of dust and a voice cut off mid-sentence.

I drank. I worked. I didn’t sleep. That was the whole of my life now, and most days I told myself it was enough.

“Sir?” My assistant hovered in the doorway. “The gala guest list …. you said to flag anything unusual.”

“Fine. What is it.”

“There’s a photo you should see.”

I looked up, exhausted, half-present. Then I saw it, and every ounce of tiredness burned off me in an instant.

“…Ivy.”

Red hair. Green eyes. No trace left of the freckled, scraped-knee kid who’d dragged me through a fence eighteen years ago …. just a woman now, beautiful in a way that made my chest ache before my mind caught up with my fury. Her green eyes still held that same stubborn look. A fierce beauty. One I needed to tame.

“You know her, sir?”

My jaw tightened.

Eighteen years later, a photograph would prove me wrong.

And the moment I saw the woman in that photograph, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

Find her.

Make her remember.

And make her pay.