Third Person POV
The moment Olivia pushed open the apartment door, she knew something was wrong. Not the ordinary wrong of a bad day or a forgotten chore, but the kind of wrong that settles into your bones before your mind can process it.
The lights were off. The air was too still, suspended, as if the oxygen itself had forgotten how to circulate. Dust motes hung visible in the thin strip of fading sunlight from the window, unmoving. Waiting.
"Carter?" she called out quietly, her voice sounding foreign in the unnatural silence.
No answer. Just the low hum of the fridge and the faint rustle of wind at the window. The normality of those sounds felt obscene against the wrongness prickling at her skin.
Then she saw him, slumped on the floor near the couch. His body awkwardly twisted, one arm stretched outward like he'd been reaching for something. Or someone. His favorite gray hoodie bunched around his torso, revealing the pale skin of his lower back. A bottle of pills was nearby, empty. Little white circles were scattered across the hardwood like stars fallen from their constellations. Blood smeared faintly at the corner of his mouth, bright crimson against his colorless lips.
Her breath caught in her chest, sharp enough to cut her from the inside. But she didn't scream. Screaming was for people who still believed help would come if they made enough noise. Olivia had stopped believing that long ago.
She dropped to her knees beside him, the impact sending jolts of pain up her thighs that she barely registered. Her fingers trembled as she checked for a pulse, pressing against the cool skin of his neck. Faint. Too faint. Like the whisper of someone already halfway gone. But there.
There.
With one hand, she dialed emergency services, her voice mechanical as she gave the address, the situation. Words like "overdose," "unconscious," and "barely breathing" fell from her lips like stones.
With the other, she texted the only person who needed to know. The only one who loved him as much as she did, maybe more.
Carter OD'd. It's bad. Come now.
Three sentences. Twelve words. A universe of pain.
As she waited, she brushed Carter's dark hair from his forehead. It was damp with sweat despite how cold his skin felt. She remembered him at eleven, gangly and shy, hiding behind that same curtain of hair at his mother's funeral. He'd held her hand then, he couldn't understand why his mom wasn't coming home. Now his hand lay limp in hers.
"Don't you dare," she whispered fiercely. "Don't you dare leave me."
The sirens wailed in the distance, getting closer. Olivia held her best friend's hand and counted his shallow breaths, each one a small victory, each one possibly the last.
Aishwariya's POV
I didn't even feel my feet as I ran. They could have been bloody, broken—I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't have cared.
The text had hit me like a gunshot, and the world blurred around its edges. He promised me that he would be clean now. I believed him. I know he needs time, but I never thought that next time I would be seeing him in the hospital, bad.
The antiseptic smell hit me first when I burst through the emergency entrance. Chemicals mask the underlying scent of human suffering. The hospital lights were too bright, clinical and unforgiving, exposing every terror on my face. My breath was ragged, scraping against my throat raw with unshed tears, and my chest ached with every heartbeat as if it knew something I couldn't bear to hear.
"Carter West," I gasped at the nurse, his name a prayer on my lips. "The overdose—they brought him in—"
Her eyes softened with that particular pity reserved for people whose world is collapsing in a waiting room. She'd seen it before. She'd see it again.
She pointed. "ER, trauma wing. Room 6."
I ran. Past gurneys and medical staff who blurred like ghosts. Past a crying woman clutching a child. Past an elderly man staring into the middle distance with vacant eyes. Other people's tragedies registered as nothing more than obstacles between me and Carter.
I pushed open the curtain, and I saw him.
Time stopped.
Machines beeped quietly around him, the rhythm mocking a heartbeat that should have been stronger. A pale blue sheet was pulled to his chest, the color highlighting how gray his skin had become. Electrodes ran over his skin like alien appendages, claiming him. A tube disappeared down his throat. His face was too still—Carter was never still, always fidgeting, always moving, energy barely contained in human form. His lips, usually full of quiet smirks or thoughtful silences, were slack and slightly parted around the breathing tube.
"Carter," I whispered, my voice small and broken in the humming quiet.
No response. Not even a flicker of those eyelashes that had always been unfairly long.
I dropped into the chair beside him. My hand reached for his. Cold. Heavy. Not the hand that had cupped my face last week, thumb tracing my cheekbone with such tenderness I'd nearly wept.
"You don't get to do this," I said, my voice cracking like thin ice under too much weight. "You don't get to leave me like this. Not after everything."
The tears came hard. Ugly. The kind that distorts your face and steals your breath and taste like salt and snot and pure grief. I didn't wipe them away. Let the world see what loving Carter West had done to me. Let him see if he could see anything at all from wherever he was drifting.
"I know I was late," I confessed, the words clawing their way out of my throat. "I knew something was wrong when you didn't answer my calls. I should have come earlier. I know I didn't get to you in time. But I'm here now." My fingers tightened around his lifeless ones. "And you have to fight. Because I didn't come this far to lose you again."
He didn't stir. Just the mechanical rise and fall of his chest, forced by machines.
A sob burst from my chest, ripping through me with physical pain. I pressed my forehead to his hand, breathing in the lingering scent of his skin beneath the hospital disinfectant. The faint trace of that sandalwood cologne I'd given him for his birthday.
"Stay with me," I begged, my lips moving against his skin. "Please."
The machines beeped their sterile response.
Third Person POV
The cuffs clicked too loudly in the quiet of the luxury townhouse. Cold metal against warm skin—the first hint of many freedoms Aaron was about to lose.
Aaron didn't speak as the officers read him his rights. The words floated around him, familiar from countless crime shows but suddenly surreal when applied to his own life. Who would believe Aishwariya? A girl with a broken engagement and too much emotion? A photographer whose work he'd systematically tried to destroy out of pure spite and wounded ego?
He hadn't counted on her father still having connections in the prosecutor's office.
Or the private investigator who'd traced the cyberbullying campaigns back to IP addresses in his home and office.
Or the former assistant who turned over damning emails, surveillance contracts, and even recorded voice notes stored in a cloud drive labeled "A-Backup" as if Aishwariya were nothing more than a problematic project to be managed.
"Make sure the leak goes live before her next big wedding shoot. Maximum damage."
"If enough clients drop her, she'll come running back. She'll see she needs me."
The digital trail was clean, undeniable. His IP. His voice. His carefully constructed trap was laid bare for the court to see.
His fingerprints are on everything.
Now, as flashbulbs from press cameras lit up the street, how quickly the vultures gathered when a prominent entertainment lawyer fell—Aaron lifted his chin. A mask of control settled over his features like it had a thousand times in court. But inside, something clawed at his chest with razor-sharp talons.
She was really gone.
She had really chosen someone else.
Worse—she had stood up. Fought back. Built evidence. Then walked away without a backward glance, leaving him to face the consequences he'd never imagined would touch him.
And he had lost.
Not just the game he'd been playing. But everything. His practice. His reputation. His freedom. And her, though he'd lost her long before today. Perhaps he'd never really had her at all.
As the officers guided him toward the waiting car, a neighbor watched from their window. Aaron saw their eyes meet his, then slide away in disgust. The first of many such looks to come. Aaron felt something crack beneath his carefully constructed facade. Something that felt terrifyingly like regret.
Aishwariya's POV
The night wore on, measured in the steady beeps of the heart monitor and the hourly rounds of nurses who checked vitals and adjusted medications with professional detachment.
I didn't leave. Couldn't leave. My body had forgotten how to exist anywhere but this uncomfortable chair, how to breathe any air that wasn't shared with him.
Nurses came and went, some offering kind smiles, others respecting the bubble of grief that surrounded Carter's bed. Olivia sat with me for a while, her eyes red-rimmed and vacant, shoulders hunched under the weight of her best friend-shaped guilt. We didn't speak much. What was there to say? We both loved a man who kept trying to disappear.
After a few hours, she squeezed my hand. "Aish, you look exhausted," Olivia whispered, her eyes red-rimmed but full of concern. "You should go home, get some sleep. I'll stay with him."
I shook my head, not trusting my voice at first. When I found it, the words came out hoarse but firm. "I can't. I won't."
"You're running on fumes," she insisted, her hand on my shoulder. "Carter would—"
"Don't," I cut her off. "Don't tell me what Carter would want." My fingers tightened around his limp hand. "He wanted a lot of things, but he's here instead."
Olivia flinched, and immediately, I regretted my harshness. "I'm sorry. But please, understand. I can't leave him."
Sebastian appeared in the doorway then, his tall frame casting a long shadow into the room. He took in the scene with one glance – Carter's still form, my stubborn vigil, Olivia's exhaustion.
"Come on, Liv," he said softly, stepping inside to wrap an arm around her shoulders. "I'm taking you home. Shower, sleep, then we'll bring Aish some coffee and clean clothes in the morning."
Olivia hesitated, looking between Carter and me.
"I'll call if anything changes," I promised. "Even the smallest thing."
She nodded finally, leaning into Seb's solid presence. "You call. Immediately."
"I swear."
Seb gave me a solemn nod, understanding in his eyes. They'd been friends since school, and I knew he was carrying his weight of worry. "Take care of him," he murmured. "And yourself too."
I barely registered her departure. The room could have caught fire, and I would have stayed, one hand wrapped around Carter's, my thumb running over his wrist. I kept waiting for Carter to twitch. To move. To flinch from a dream or respond to my voice. For some sign that he was swimming back toward the surface and not sinking deeper into whatever darkness had swallowed him.
But he didn't.
A doctor came in around midnight, her face carefully neutral as she explained what the toxicology had found—a cocktail of pills and alcohol, the heroin they'd managed to counter with Narcan, the damage to his system they were still assessing. Words like "induced coma," "next 24 hours," and "prepared for all outcomes" settled around me like crows.
When she left, the silence pressed in again, broken only by the machines keeping vigil with me.
I talked to him. I couldn't stop. As if my voice could be a thread he might follow back.
I told him things I'd never said out loud—how scared I was when we first met. How his talks had moved me to tears. How alive I felt whenever he is with me, and how eating ice cream with him I feel good. How much I loved him, even when I was too afraid to admit it.
"Remember that night at the studio when we were I was preparing for the art show ?" I whispered, my voice hoarse from hours of one-sided conversation. "When we stayed until dawn, and you said the colors in the sky were proof that beauty comes after the darkest hours? I need you to believe that now."
I pressed my lips to his knuckles, tasting salt.
"You don't get to be a memory," I insisted fiercely. "You don't get to be something I look back on and wonder what might have been. You're real. You're here. And you're mine. Do you hear me, Carter West? You're mine, and I'm not giving you up to whatever demons you thought were stronger than us."
But the beeping stayed steady. Unchanged. His chest rose and fell in the same mechanical rhythm that had nothing of Carter's natural energy.
He was here. But he wasn't awake.
And so I waited. Holding the hand of the man who once saved me, without knowing it, who had seen my art when no one else would look, who had defended my art when Aaron had tried to belittle it, who had shown me what love could feel like without possession.
Now it was my turn. I wasn't leaving until he found his way back.
I rested my head on the edge of his bed, my fingers still intertwined with his. Through the window, the first hints of dawn began to lighten the sky, pinks and oranges bleeding into the darkness. Morning was coming, whether we were ready or not.
"The sky's changing color," I told him softly. "You're missing it. Come back and I'll take you to the beach you once told me that you would love to go to, because it reminds you of your hometown, Paradise Island. I'll draw you in that light you love so much." My voice broke. "Just come back."
The monitor beeped. Regular. Unchanging.
But as I watched his face through tear-blurred vision, I thought—maybe—his fingers twitched against mine.
So small a movement it might have been nothing.
But in that moment, it was everything.
Hope—painful, fragile, terrible hope—bloomed in my chest as I clutched his hand tighter and whispered his name like a prayer, an incantation, a lifeline thrown into dark waters.
"Carter. I'm here. I'm still here."