Harry Styles, a secret service agent working for British intelligence is tasked with finding the killer after a series of brutal but calculated murders across Europe. His mind is sharp, he's smart, arrogant and works with a precision that leaves no...
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Winter
The rain poured down on me like it was mocking my tears.
It soaked through my clothes, chilled my skin, but I barely felt it. I was already drowning from the inside out.
I sat on the street, my feet on the road, perched on the curb with my face hidden in my knees, my arms wrapped around myself. Trying to disappear into the smallest version of myself I could find. And I sobbed. I sobbed like I was never going to stop. My chest ached, my throat was raw from each strained inhale.
It had all been a lie. I didn't know what to believe anymore. I didn't know who to trust.
I couldn't bring myself to go far when I left the flat in a mess.
My feet had only just carried me downstairs and out of the front door to the building when my body nearly gave out on me. I didn't know where I planned to go, I just knew that I needed to leave, I couldn't be in there with him anymore. Not as it felt like the walls were closing in on me. I had nowhere else to go, I quickly realised. I had nothing. I had nobody. It was something I always knew deep down. I was the same little girl who sat alone in the corner while everyone else had their friends. I was never the type to have friends, close relationships with anybody. I didn't know how. I wasn't built for this. And the first time I'd felt a glimpse of it, it blew up in my face.
I didn't know what I'd expected. Harry and I had been destined to be destroyed from the very beginning. Maybe it had never really mattered what we felt. What had we thought? We'd get some happy ending? Did I think I'd ever be able to escape what I truly was—a fucking monster. Fucked up beyond repair. And he knew it. He'd recorded every fear, every trauma. A reminder of how destroyed I was from the inside out.
But still, he was all I wanted. I ached for him. To feel his arms around me, to feel his breath tickle my cheek when he leaned in for a kiss. I ached to feel how gentle his hands were when they touched me. How gentle he always had been.
But I'd never feel him again. I couldn't. Not when he'd played a part in rotting my mind, ruining me. What kept me awake at night was his doing. I lay beside him night after night, tearing myself apart for even thinking he could hurt me, convincing myself that the horror I remembered wasn't true, just as everyone told me. But it was. At least some of it.
He'd kept the photo. He'd kept the files. He'd written me down like I was a case study, a tragedy to be observed and recorded. Every trauma, every vulnerability. How was I now meant to differ between what was real and what was fake? I never wanted to believe that Harry could be so cold, that he would ever dream of grabbing me like that, dragging me downstairs and handing me over to the people I was most terrified over. But I also never wanted to believe that he would have gathered every part of information I'd told him about myself and compiled a report. Whether he thought it was to do good or not. I didn't know what to believe. And he'd gaslit me for months.
