The Takeover (The Miles High Club 2)

I nod. What else could it be?

He drops his head; his face is solemn. “Goodbye, Claire.”

“Why?” I cry. “Why do you want this so much?”

He turns to me like the devil himself. “Because I deserve my own family, God damn it. And I love them, and if you can’t see that, I don’t even fucking know who you are.”

My heart drops.

He leans forward. “All this time . . . I thought you loved me,” he whispers through tears. He pauses as my eyes search his. “Guess not.”

“Tris,” I whisper.

He turns and marches through the doors and into the airport.

“Tristan,” I call.

He keeps walking.

“Tristan!” I cry.

The private doors open, and he walks through them without looking back. Security guards step in front of them to block me from running after him.

He’s gone.

Tristan

Fourteen days and fourteen nights . . . living without her.

Without them.

I sip my beer as I stare at the football game on the screen. I’m in the busiest American pub in Paris. People are everywhere. I hear their voices in the distance; the echoes of their jovial laughter fill the space. But I feel as if I’m hovering above them, not really here, not really there.

In a detached state, cut . . . to the bone.

If it were a physical injury, I would be in intensive care, barely clinging to life.

The heart hurts more than any injury ever could. It beats weakly . . . barely at all.

Every breath that I take feels like my chest is about to cave in.

Every exhale a struggle.

The walls have closed in, the dust has settled, and yet nothing has changed.

The world is spinning at a million miles per minute, but the silence without them . . . is deafening.

I never knew what it felt like to lose someone you loved. A heartbeat that once we shared, I can no longer hear.

I lost four pieces of myself on the same day.

My entire world.

I sip my beer as I stare at the television screen on the wall.

I want to talk to my boys . . . I want to kiss my girl.

And then I remember the painful truth.