Impale (verb): to pierce with a sharp stake through the body

“Just listen to reason!” He clenched his fists harder, struggling to keep his voice from climbing to a shout. “I’m trying to do what’s best for you.”

“You’re trying to keep me from doing my job!” The distorted scowl on his fiancée's face looked unfamiliar. She’d never spoken so harshly against him.

A deep sigh.

He closed his eyes, feeling his heart open and close with the drum of every heartbeat. The memories were too vivid—a half-mad killer brandishing a bloody knife, a few police officers positioned in the wrong positions, the love of his life stranded in the middle, and himself completely unable to help. It almost felt as if life was taunting him, replaying the scenes of his trauma like a horror film in a broken theater without any light.

“I survived that time, only physically,” he whispered quietly. “I don’t care if you have to drop the case, but you are not coming with me tomorrow. You’re a lawyer—no, you’re a human. You could’ve died by that knife today, and you could die just as easily in the future.”

He’d made this mistake once. Knowing he was a police captain, he’d let his late wife follow him on missions as a soldier and not a lover… and the knife in her chest that night could’ve been lodged there with his own hands.

But the same, fiery passion shone like a phoenix in his fiancée's eyes today, as if rebirth had dealt another hand in their shared fate. “By locking me up in here, you might as well be stabbing me with your own little knife.”

With this, he shattered.