Page 21 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

And I’m living my best fucking life.

KELLAN

THE LETTER HE NEVER SENT…

Tor,

Some things you write because you need to say them.

Some things you write because you are running out of time to say them any other way.

This is both.

I don't know how to start this.

I've written it four times. Sat in the dark with the pen in my hand and the words backing up behind my teeth like a flood I've spent two years holding. I don't have the luxury of getting this right anymore. I can feel it, the way you feel a storm before it arrives, that low pressure in the chest, that particular stillness in the air. Something is coming. I don't know when. I don't know exactly how. But I know it's coming for me and I am running out of time to say what I should have said the night I kissed you for the first time and understood that I had never once in my life actually been afraid until that moment.

I was afraid because you mattered.

You have always mattered more than anything I was supposed to be protecting.

I love you.

I need you to know that before anything else. Before the explanation and the confession and all the things I did that you're going to hate me for when you understand the full shape of them. Before all of this. I love you. I have loved you for longer than I've been able to admit to myself, long before that night, long before the kiss, long before the crash took everything and left us both standing in the rubble of it trying to find north.

I love you in the way that doesn't ask anything back. The kind that just exists, constant and present and inconvenient as hell, because you can't choose it or undo it any more than you can choose the tide. I tried to stop. God, Tor, I tried. I told myself you were Masen's little sister, off-limits, untouchable, a line I had no right to cross. I told myself the pull I felt was just proximity, just familiarity, just two people who'd grown up in each other's orbit for so long it only felt like gravity.

I was lying to myself.

You were never just proximity. You were never just familiar. You walked into every room like you owned the air in it and had no idea, and I watched you do it every single time and felt something shift in my chest that I had no word for and no right to act on.

So I didn't.

I buried it. I got very, very good at burying it.

I found the file on my father's desk three weeks before the crash.

I need you to understand what that night was, stripped of everything I've let you believe about it. I opened a folder I wasn't supposed to find and I read the full truth about the world you and I had grown up standing at the edges of without ever knowing what it was. Your father. His cartel. Masen's involvement. The Devlin operation and what Lorenzo was building and how deep the corruption ran through both towns, through every person we trusted, through the ground beneath our feet.

And Meekan's name. Right there, in black and white. Our friend. The man you would have called first if anything went wrong.

I sat in my father's office for a long time with that folder in my hands and I understood that I had no one. Every person I would have turned to was in those pages. Every road I would have taken was already compromised.

Except you.

You were the only name that wasn't in those pages and that terrified me more than everything that was, because it meant you were the one they hadn't gotten to yet. It meant you were the one they would use if they needed something from me. It meant loving you out loud was the most dangerous thing I could do to you.

So I made a call. Deputy Director Fiona Williams, CIA. A woman who sat across from me in a car on a dark road and spoke like someone who had never once in their life been surprised by anything, and offered me a deal that felt like a lifeline and was actually a leash I would spend two years choking on.

I signed it before the crash.

I need you to know that. I was already trying to get you out. I was already building something in the dark that was supposed to protect you without you ever knowing it existed. I had already traded pieces of myself I'm not getting back for the guarantee of your safety.

And then the crash happened and none of it mattered and everything got so much worse.

I've relived that road every night since.

Not the impact, though God knows that plays on a loop too, but the moments before it. The moments I could have changed it..