I don't remember the exact sound of the gunshot anymore.
It's strange, because people always say those things stay in your head forever. But for me, it's not the bang that wakes me up at night. It's the silence that came after.
That silence still haunts me.
It was too heavy, too loud, too final.
The city outside didn't stop. Cars kept rushing by, horns blaring, laughter spilling from bars down the block. But inside that room, the world ended. His world. Maybe mine too.
I was standing there, my hands shaking, my chest burning as if the air itself had turned against me. The smell of expensive whiskey mixed with iron and smoke. My throat closed up. I couldn't scream. I couldn't move. I just stared at him, sprawled across the polished floor like he had fallen asleep in the middle of an argument. Only he wasn't asleep.
Blood spread fast under his body, staining the wood that had probably cost more than my entire foster home. I remember thinking how ridiculous it was—that even dying, he had to look rich. Even his death felt staged for some kind of cruel performance.
But it wasn't.
It was real.
Too real.
I should start from the beginning. People will want to know how I got here, how a law student ended up standing in the middle of a penthouse, staring at the lifeless body of the only person who ever made me feel like I wasn't just surviving.
The truth is, I don't know where the beginning is. Maybe it's when I lost my parents and got shoved into the house of strangers who smiled in public but froze me out in private. Maybe it's when I learned to swallow my words so they wouldn't use them against me. Or maybe it was the night I met him, when our worlds collided under flickering subway lights and nothing felt safe again.
He wasn't supposed to be part of my story.
I wasn't supposed to fall for him.
And he wasn't supposed to die.
But none of that matters now. The detectives don't care about love or fate. They care about evidence. They care about timelines, fingerprints, motives. And right now, all of those things point to me.
When the cops stormed in, their boots echoing against marble, I finally managed to open my mouth. I tried to say he wasn't just a body, that he wasn't just another spoiled rich boy who drank too much and crossed the wrong people. I tried to say he mattered. That he mattered to me.
But the words came out broken, useless.
They saw a crying girl with blood on her hands.
They didn't see the nights we spent talking until dawn, or the way his laugh cracked through my walls. They didn't see the boy who kissed me like I wasn't disposable.
They saw a suspect.
I didn't blame them. For one awful moment, even I wondered if I had done it. If I had somehow pushed him too far, if my rage had slipped out of control. I remembered the fight—the shouting, the sharp sting of words that couldn't be taken back. I remembered slamming the glass down on the counter, shards scattering. I remembered the look in his eyes right before the silence fell.
What if I had killed him?
No.
I couldn't think like that.
The truth hid somewhere in that room, buried under blood and secrets. And the only way to find it would be to tear apart everything I thought I knew about him, about his family, about myself.
I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask for love or money or the weight of another dead body in my life. All I ever wanted was to finish law school, to prove to myself that I could make something more than tragedy out of my name. But life doesn't care about what you want. Life takes. And then it dares you to keep walking.
That night, standing over his body, I felt the ground beneath me split open. Part of me wanted to let it swallow me whole, end it right there. But another part—the part that refused to die when I was a little girl—dug its nails in and refused to let go.
I didn't know it then, but the fight was only beginning.
Because this wasn't just about love anymore.
This was about survival.
....
The first time I saw him alive, he didn't look anything like the corpse I'd come to know too well. He was careless laughter, expensive cologne, leather seats, and neon lights bouncing off champagne glasses. He was too much and not enough all at once.
I told myself I hated him. Told myself his kind didn't see people like me. But hate is a tricky thing—it cuts too close to longing. And maybe that's why I kept looking when I should've walked away.
I remember how his world tasted: sharp, sweet, burning down the throat. How every night with him felt like trespassing into a life that wasn't mine. And I remember how, piece by piece, he pulled me in deeper. Until there was no way out.
I didn't know then that love could be a crime scene.
The city doesn't care about broken hearts. It chews them up, spits them out, and lights another cigarette. Every block here has its own rhythm: the pounding bass of clubs, the metallic screech of the subway, the wail of sirens slicing through the night. You get used to it. Or you go crazy.
He used to say the noise kept him alive. He needed chaos to drown out the silence inside him. I understood that more than I wanted to admit. That's probably why we worked, at least for a while. We were both running from ghosts, and we thought maybe we could outrun them together.
But ghosts don't get tired. They wait. And when they finally catch up, they don't just haunt you—they ruin you.
That night in the penthouse, the city still buzzed outside. I could see the skyline glowing through the glass walls, like nothing bad could ever happen here. But inside, blood soaked into the cracks of wood. His phone kept vibrating on the table, unanswered. And my hands—God, my hands—shook so hard I thought they might fall off.
I whispered his name. Once. Twice. A hundred times.
He didn't answer.
And that was when it hit me: love stories don't always end in wedding bells or even heartbreak. Sometimes they end in flashing sirens and body bags.
I wish I could say I ran that night. That I left before the cops arrived, wiped my prints clean, disappeared into the crowd. But I stayed. I stayed because leaving him there alone felt worse than being caught. I stayed because part of me believed he'd wake up, laugh it off, call me dramatic.
But he didn't.
He never would again.
....
Now, as I sit here trying to put the pieces together, I know this much: nothing about this is simple. He wasn't the saint I wanted him to be. His family wasn't as untouchable as they pretended. And me? I wasn't as innocent as I liked to think.
Everyone has blood on their hands in this city. Some of us just hide it better.
So, if you're looking for a fairytale, stop here. This isn't one.
This is the story of how love turned into evidence.
This is the story of how I became a suspect.
And maybe, just maybe, this is the story of how I learn to live with the silence that never lets me go.
Because in the end, the silence was louder than the gunshot.
And it still is.