All Chapters of The Softest Kind of Ruin: Chapter 11 - Chapter 18

“I always knew it would end like this.”She hadn’t meant to stay late. But lately, time didn’t behave like it used to. It slipped sideways—soft, ungraspable—folding her days into fog. Hours bled into each other like spilled water, and she drifted through them with the quiet precision of someone performing a life they no longer owned. Smiling. Nodding. Pretending.Everyone thought she was healing. She let them. Wore normalcy like a coat two sizes too big—awkward, heavy, impossible to shrug off.The city tonight felt suspended. The kind of quiet that doesn’t soothe—it warns. Silver light pooled beneath flickering streetlamps. Leaves skated down gutters. Somewhere, music spilled faintly from an open window, but even that felt far away. Disconnected. Like the world was holding its breath.She walked.Not hurried. Not slow. Just enough to feel in control. Her fingers curled around her keys, the jagged metal biting into her palm—a small pain, a sharp reminder: You’re awake. You’re here. The

She didn’t remember the collapse—only the cold tile beneath her knees, the smell of blood that wasn’t hers, and William, gasping beneath her hands—pressure applied too hard, too late, like trying to stop time with fingers and breath.Then… silence.The doctors called it shock. Dehydration. Acute stress response. Words that circled the truth without touching it. Words that didn’t come close to what it felt like to break.Yvette found her. Three days later. Curled on the bathroom floor. Her body hollowed out, her voice gone. William had already been rushed into surgery. The apartment reeked of old copper and something worse—something missing.There were bandages on her hands—scrapes from broken glass, maybe. A bruise darkened her ribs. A stitched cut on her shoulder she didn’t remember getting.She never asked how Yvette found her. Never asked who called the ambulance. There were bigger things to understand.She spent two nights in the hospital. The walls didn’t feel sterile. They felt

The kettle whistled softly.Nicole stood at the stove, one hand curled around the handle of a chipped mug, the other resting absently against her stomach. Steam curled up and fogged the small kitchen window, turning the city outside into a smear of grey. The air smelled like jasmine—and something sharper. Metallic.Behind her, Keiran moved without sound. He always did. But she felt him there. The way the temperature shifted when he entered the room. The quiet tightening in her spine when his gaze lingered too long.She poured the tea. Two cups. She didn’t ask if he wanted one anymore. He always drank it, even if it sat cooling in his hands for hours.There was a rhythm now. A routine stitched together from silence and strange comfort. He slept on the edge of her bed. Sometimes on the floor. Always close. She never asked where he went when he left the apartment. She didn’t ask about the blood she occasionally smelled on his coat, or why the knives in the drawer were always rearranged.

The end didn’t come quietly.It came with headlights cutting through the trees. With boots crunching gravel. With the silence between them thick as blood.They had been happy. Or something close to it. A crooked version of happiness, made of stolen mornings and whispered names, of shared breath and locked doors. But nothing built on ruin lasts forever.He felt it before she did—the shift in the air. They were closing in.Keiran had stood in the kitchen, hands trembling for the first time in years. Nicole had found him there, frozen, knife still in hand, the sound of her voice barely reaching him.“They found us, didn’t they?” He didn’t answer. Just looked at her like she was already slipping away.When she tried to follow him out the door, he stopped her. Gripped her shoulders. Hard, like he was trying to memorize the shape of her. “You don’t go with me,” he said.Her voice cracked. “I’m not letting you—”“You have to.”She shook her head, eyes wild with refusal, with grief. “I stayed