Haunted || Simon Riley

"Am I-", she swallowed thickly, "am I dying, Simon?"

"Nah, kid. You'll be alright. Just stay awake." He assured her, trying to sound like it was a simple, undisputed fact. Like gravity. Like the sun would rise. She would be alright.

But the sun wasn't bleeding out in front of him.

She laughed, low and weak, smiling sleepily up at the masked man.

"Isn't that what you have to tell somebody who's about to die?" She murmured, "You'll be alright".

******

Bridget Costello has spent six years trying and failing to outrun the night that ruined her life. What should have been the spring break of a lifetime ended with her best friend dead and Bridget dragged through a violence that still haunts her. Violence she isn't sure she deserved to survive.

Now at twenty-four, she is an aspiring painter hiding behind the sticky counter of a busy New York bar, doing her best to get through each day and numb her guilt with routine and late nights. She keeps her head down, her world small.

But the past refuses to die. It clings to her in the lonely moments like a ghost, a relentless loop of violence and death she can't escape and has never felt entitled to forget.

So when a familiar pair of dark eyes walks into her bar, it feels less like coincidence and more like a fault line giving way.

The man who pulled her out of hell. Now he's standing in front of her again, carrying the same voice that's lived in her head for years-the one thing that's ever been able to pull her from her nightmares.

His arrival tears something open inside her, something she thought she'd buried for good. Because whatever tied them together in those brutal minutes all those years ago never really let go.