RHYS

Fire.

My twelve-year-old hands shake as I pour gasoline down the hallway, the acrid fumes burning my nostrils and making my eyes water. Behind me, screaming. Chaos. Fists pounding on doors—some desperate to escape, others trying to reach us before we can finish what we've started.

I don't look back.

"Please," I whisper to whatever god might be listening, though I stopped believing in divine intervention the first time Mr. Patterson's belt left welts across my back. "Please let this work."

My knuckles are split, bleeding from the fight I just won. Peterson tried to stop me—grabbed my arm, twisted it behind my back, whispered all the terrible things he'd do to me for this rebellion. He's unconscious now, sprawled in the supply closet with a broken nose and a nasty gash on his temple.

My shirt is torn, hanging off one shoulder. There's blood on it—some mine, most his.

But my storm-gray eyes are focused on one thing: buying time.

The matchbook trembles in my hand. Red sulfur tips against cheap cardboard. Twenty matches. I only need one.

I strike it.

The flame dances to life, a tiny point of light that holds so much destruction. For a moment, I'm mesmerized by it. Fire is honest. It doesn't pretend to be something it's not. It consumes. It destroys. It cleanses.

Just like what this place did to us.

"Run, sunshine," I call out, knowing she's already moving toward the back exit like I told her to. "Fucking run."

I drop the match.

The gasoline ignites with a whoosh that steals the oxygen from my lungs. Heat blasts my face, and I stumble backward as flames race down the hallway in both directions—a beautiful, terrible wall of orange and gold that turns the dingy foster home into an inferno.

Through the smoke, I see a silhouette—small, stumbling toward the exit with the bag I packed clutched against a thin chest.

Going to make it.

Going to be free.

Going to—

Headlights cut through the smoke.

Brakes screech.

A scream—high and terrified and wrong.

The sickening thud of impact echoes through the night, louder than the roar of flames, louder than the chaos behind me, louder than my own heartbeat.

"NO!"

I try to run, try to reach the street, try to do something, but hands grab me—rough, adult hands that have no right to touch me but do anyway because I'm just a kid and kids don't get choices.

"It's over, kid," a firefighter says, pulling me back from the flames, away from the street, away from everything that matters.

But it's not over.

The hands drag me toward the ambulance. I fight. Kick. Scream. Bite.

"There's someone—they were hit—please—"

"We've got them, son. Calm down."

"Are they alive? Are they alive?"

No one answers.

Through the chaos of emergency vehicles and shouting and water being sprayed on the burning building, I see them loading a small body onto a stretcher. So still. Too still.

"SUNSHINE!"

My voice cracks. Breaks. Shatters into a million pieces just like my heart.

No movement.

No response.

The ambulance doors close, and everything that matters disappears.

Seven years later, I wake up.

Same nightmare.

Same memory.

Same fucking helplessness that makes me want to put my fist through the wall of my penthouse bedroom.

My sheets are soaked with sweat. My heart is racing. My hands are clenched so tight my nails have left crescent marks in my palms.

I sit up, running my hands through my hair, trying to ground myself in the present. I'm not twelve anymore. I'm not powerless. I'm not that broken kid who set fire to a foster home and watched everything fall apart.

I'm Rhys Hawthorne now.

Heir to the Hawthorne Tech Empire.

Untouchable.

Feared.

Powerful.

But none of that power changed the past.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. 3:47 AM. I grab it, squinting at the screen.

DAMON: You alive? Heard you moving around.

Of course he did. Damon's room is next to mine, and the man sleeps like a paranoid insomniac. Which, given our world, is probably smart.

ME: Same nightmare.

DAMON: It's been 7 years, Rhys. Maybe it's time to let it go.

ME: Fuck off.

DAMON: That's what I thought. Coffee in 20?

ME: Make it 30.

I drop the phone and head to the bathroom, turning the shower to scalding. The water pounds against my skin, washing away the sweat and the lingering echoes of smoke and screaming.

But it doesn't wash away the memory.

Nothing ever does.

The water runs cold before I finally turn it off.

I stare at myself in the mirror—storm-gray eyes, dark hair, a face that's lost all the softness of childhood. I look like my father now. Whoever the fuck he was. All sharp angles and hard edges and barely contained violence.

I dry off and pull on clothes—black button-up, tailored trousers, the armor I wear to face the world. The Rhys Hawthorne everyone knows. Charming. Clever. Untouchable. A fuckboy who collects women like trophies and discards them just as easily.

But it's all bullshit.

Every single bit of it.

Because underneath the expensive clothes and the careless smile and the carefully constructed persona, I'm still that twelve-year-old boy standing in front of a burning building, watching everything that mattered disappear.

My phone buzzes again.

DAMON: Coffee's ready. Stop brooding and get your ass down here.

I grab my phone and head downstairs, my feet silent on the marble floors of the penthouse Dad bought for Adrian and me when we started university. Adrian's door is closed—he's probably still wrapped around Lilia, the girl who somehow tamed my calculating, strategic older brother. They got married six months ago in a ceremony that was equal parts elegant and ridiculously over the top because Adrian doesn't do anything halfway.

Watching them together does something to me. Makes that hollowness in my chest ache harder.

The kitchen is dark except for the light above the espresso machine where Damon is already pulling shots. He doesn't look up when I enter, just slides a cup across the counter.

"You know," he says, his voice deliberately casual, "most people use therapy to deal with childhood trauma."

"Most people aren't us."

"Fair point." He takes a sip of his own coffee, black eyes watching me over the rim. "Same dream?"

"Same memory," I correct. "There's a difference."

"Not really. Not when you won't let it go."

I don't answer. What the fuck am I supposed to say?

"Luca texted last night," Damon says, changing the subject because he knows me well enough to recognize when I'm about to shut down completely. "He and Ana are back from their honeymoon in Tuscany. Wants to know if we're coming to the welcome-back dinner Mom is throwing."

Lucifer de Rivel. The French crime lord who married Ana Moreau after a stalking-kidnapping situation that somehow turned into actual love. The man is terrifying and completely obsessed with his wife in a way that would be disturbing if it wasn't so fucking honest.

"Yeah, we'll go. Mom will hunt us down if we don't."

Damon smirks. "True. That woman is scarier than all of us combined when she wants to be."

"That's because she's the only person Dad is actually afraid of disappointing."

"Love does that to men."

I think about Ares and Celeste—Dad and Mom, the people who found me three months after the fire and didn't just adopt me, but actually gave a fuck. About Adrian and Lilia. About Luca and Ana. About all these powerful, dangerous men who found women who somehow made them want to be better.

Mom especially. Celeste Hawthorne, who looked at a fucked-up twelve-year-old with trust issues and anger problems and decided he was worth loving anyway. Who didn't push when I woke up screaming. Who just held me and told me it was okay to be broken as long as I didn't stay that way.

She saved me in ways I'll never be able to repay.

The nightmare will fade.

It always does.

But the memory?

The memory is permanent.

Carved into my bones.

Written in smoke and flame and the sound of screaming.

Seven years, and I still don't know if that night ended in tragedy or escape.

Seven years, and I'm still that kid standing in the street, watching ambulance doors close.

Seven years.

And I still can't let it go.