Prologue

It was late at night. It was dark. Mike was not supposed to be there. Yet, there he was.

Slipping quietly between the glass doors was easy. As he strode through the kitchen, Mike wondered how easily Sid had been able to break in and how easily he could've done the same, again.

There was a deathly silence, broken by the faint sound of a shower running upstairs. The silence felt almost surreal, as if everything around him was nothing but a mere illusion, a stupid trick of his mind and eyes that had become accustomed to emptiness.

For months he'd done nothing but lying down, his eyes flipping from the ceiling, to the floor, to those four cramped walls that had become his home. Waiting for his body to heal, looking for a breath, a light, an essence that could make him feel alive. That could remind him of what moved him once.

But nothing came, confirming his catatonic state of a body without a soul.

His steps were slow, but almost heavy with suffering. He climbed up the stairs and a burning pain shot through his side. Everything was the same, yet so different since the last time he'd been there.

The loft in the hall had been dismantled - there was a library in its place. He remembered it used to belong to the Michael Warren he once was. The guy who died strangled by his own ambitions, his petty ideals, his pretentious aspirations.

Standing in the middle of the hall, his eyes shifted to the closed door of his old room. As if he could see through the glass, beyond the shadows, beyond what he once was and represented.

He shouldn't have come. He knew that. He shouldn't have exposed himself so much after Briggs' call.

But like a moth, he had been drawn there by the only source of his own destruction.

The source that almost ended up destroying even herself, that day, in a frantic and deadly car chase. Her car wrapped on itself five times before catching fire.

Just a little spark would've been enough for everything to end. To shatter in millions of pieces. But it had happened anyway, a long time ago. They had exploded in a thousand pieces, before he could even have a chance at curbing the cracks that Jesse's arrival had begun to form.

'You're more than just a passing fling.'

The memory of one of their last talks - one of the few memories that he got left now - was blurry and foreign in his mind. It eventually faded when a noise tore him away from those ethereal images and his head spun around.

Paige was at the bathroom door, wrapped in a towel, her left arm covered in stitches and bandages. Her wet hair were a little shorter than the last time he'd seen her, but her eyes were just as hard. Fixed on him as if he were made of dirt that could contaminate her. Yet, she made no move to send him away. She kept dabbing her hair with a hand towel and openly stared at him. She didn't seem surprised, nor irritated by his presence. Just, unfazed.

The silence became still and thick.

Mike watched her carefully, taking in all the marks on her body. The purple bruise on her leg was gone, but it'd been replaced by scratches and nasty burns from where she'd crawled on the boiling asphalt to escape the car fire, the bandages on her arms were bloody and he counted more than Briggs had said, the pendant around her neck dangled over a hand shaped hematoma on her chest. He didn't want to know how it'd ended up there. That wasn't what he was there for.

Briggs had been clear, he needed to check up on her and clear the place, before anything else could happen. Bring her safely to him.

He examined her until their eyes met.

It was a second, long enough so they could scrutinize each other and short enough to end in the blink of an eye when she walked past him without even brushing against his body, nor acknowledging his presence. Like he'd never been there and she was still alone in the house.

As if he were a ghost of a distant past. The ghost he felt he'd become long before then.

Suddenly, a noise almost startled him. His eyes followed the path to her room and when he blinked, the blurry image of her bare and tanned back was sensually inviting him in to join her.

A flicker of an invisible light and Paige was facing him now, her green eyes sparkling with desire and her lips trembling with a hidden smile.

Mike blinked again.

Everything disappeared and this time, the door to her room was wide shut.