𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑰𝒔 𝑮𝒐𝒍𝒅| 3

Prologue

I met him for the first time and I believed he was my saving grace.

Kam, with his beautiful soul and reverberating energy, he blinded me, consumed me with all his light until I became a shadow of my former self when I got away from his presence. I didn't know I was slowly collapsing into oblivion until I was out of his sanity-twisting halo.

I knew what it was like now, to fall in love with the Golden Boy. The boy who everyone envied and adored. The boy who ate up all the attention and admiration like it was his last meal. He was a beautiful lie, a blinding glamour and I ate him up right away. Because we all eat lies when our heart is hungry.

And I had thought the vacation had been a nightmare. But as I stared at the limp body of my cousin on the floor, long before the rumours started again. Long before the brutal bullying began in earnest... Long before my step brother came back into the picture, I realized that no... No... My nightmare was just beginning... And this time, I was all alone, all over again.

Far from Kam's saving grace.

_

I met her for the first time and I knew she would be my downfall.

Asachi, with her cynical tongue and broken soul was hard wired to expect the worst from the world and accept reality with exaggerated harshness. I was choking on her poison and I didn't even know until I became a more twisted, hazardous version of my former self.

I knew what it felt like now, to fall in love with an Ice witch. To fall in love with a damaged person who loved like a crime scene. Who packed her shit and ran away at the first sign of trouble. Who froze her heart and ripped it out of her, breaking it herself and shattering it to pieces, before anyone ever had the chance to break it for her.

And as I stood watching my mother gasp for air on the hospital bed, crippled with pain from her unidentified sickness, the scent of drugs and antiseptic, lingering in my nostrils, I realized, with destructive thudding in my heart and tiredness in my soul, that I had wasted time... So much time, generously loving a broken soul who didn't want to be fixed.

I cut myself, over and over again, trying to put her back together, not realizing that broken souls cut like knives... Everyone says they're fragile.  And that's the irony... They're anything but fragile. They're addictive. Destructive... Powerful. And Asachi Selene Dooshima...

She was my sweetest downfall.