Chapter 174 Men’s secret

Chapter 174: Chapter 174 Men’s secret

The question hung in the air!!

Where is the real Luna Hart?

Kai watched the hole in the floor where Luna—or whatever wore her face—had disappeared. The jagged edges of broken concrete jutted upward like teeth, and somewhere in the darkness below, he could hear her struggling to breathe.

Rowan stood at the edge, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. The muscles in his jaw worked furiously, grinding thoughts he couldn’t speak aloud. His eyes never left the darkness.

"Answer me," Rowan demanded again, his voice cracking. "Where is she?"

No response came from the pit.

Adrian stepped back from the hole, his expression shifting from cold fury to something more uncertain. He ran a hand through his hair and turned toward Kai, his brows drawn together.

"How did you know?"

Kai blinked. "What?"

"How did you know something was wrong with her?" Adrian’s voice was low, careful. "Before any of us noticed. Before she started acting strange. You knew."

Kai opened his mouth, then closed it.

How could he explain something he didn’t fully understand himself?

"I just..." He paused, searching for words that wouldn’t make him sound insane. "I felt it. The moment we walked through that door, something felt off. Like wearing shoes on the wrong feet. You know something isn’t right, but you can’t immediately tell what."

Adrian studied him for a long moment. "That’s it? You just felt it?"

"It’s not just that." Kai rubbed the back of his neck. "Nothing added up. She went to the kitchen instead of looking for Astrid and Miles. She kept freezing whenever food was mentioned. And the way she talked about wanting a normal life—" He shook his head. "Luna would never say that. Not after everything we’ve been through. She knows normal doesn’t exist anymore."

Adrian nodded slowly, but his expression remained troubled. He clearly wasn’t satisfied with the explanation, and honestly, Kai couldn’t blame him. "Feeling" wasn’t exactly concrete evidence. It wasn’t proof. It was just a knot in his gut that wouldn’t untie itself.

But it had been right.

Ethan’s voice cut through the tension.

"Guys."

Something in his tone made Kai’s blood run cold. He turned toward where Ethan stood at the edge of the hole, staring down into the darkness. His face had gone pale.

"She’s not breathing right."

Rowan was moving before anyone could stop him. He dropped to his knees at the edge of the pit, peering into the shadows below. "Luna? Luna!"

A weak, rasping sound drifted up from the darkness. It sounded like someone trying to breathe through a straw that was slowly being crushed.

Then it stopped.

The silence that followed was worse than any scream.

"She collapsed," Ethan whispered. "She just... collapsed."

Rowan shot to his feet. His face had transformed into something Kai had rarely seen—pure, unfiltered terror. "We have to get her out. Now. We have to—what if we’re wrong? What if that’s actually Luna down there and she’s dying while we stand here accusing her?"

His voice cracked on the last word.

Kai felt his stomach drop.

He hadn’t considered that.

None of them had.

What if the woman they’d thrown into a pit was actually Luna—the real Luna—and something had been wrong with her mind? What if she’d been suffering from something they couldn’t see? What if they’d just killed their closest friend because Kai had a feeling?

The thought made him want to vomit.

"Let’s bring her out," Rowan said, his voice desperate now. "Please. Let’s bring her out and figure this out together. I feel like we’re making a mistake."

Of course it was Rowan who said it. Classic Rowan. The one who always saw the best in people, even when they didn’t deserve it. The one who would rather risk his own life than live with the guilt of someone else’s death.

Adrian hesitated, but only for a moment. He raised his hand, and the ground began to tremble.

The floor shifted like water, rippling outward from the hole. Slowly, almost gently, the earth pushed upward, carrying something with it.

Luna’s body rose from the darkness as though the ground itself was cradling her. Her limbs were limp, her face slack, her lips tinged with blue.

The earth deposited her directly into Rowan’s waiting arms.

He caught her like she weighed nothing. Like she was the most precious thing in the world.

"Let her rest," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

He carried her to the nearby couch and laid her down with more care than Kai had ever seen him use for anything. He knelt beside her, one hand brushing the hair from her face, the other pressed against her wrist, searching for a pulse.

Ethan had resumed pacing. His footsteps were quick and uneven, a physical manifestation of the chaos in his mind.

"My memories," he said suddenly. "The ones I’m forgetting—they’re not random. They’re important things. Names. Faces. Moments that should be impossible to forget."

He stopped pacing and looked at the others.

"I can’t remember my mother’s name."

The words landed like stones in still water.

Adrian’s head snapped toward him. "What?"

"My mother’s name." Ethan’s voice was hollow. "I know I had one. I know she existed. But when I try to picture her face, when I try to remember what she called me when I was a child... there’s nothing there. Just static."

Adrian opened his mouth to respond, then stopped.

His expression changed.

Kai watched as Adrian’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed, then widened again. It was like watching someone search through a filing cabinet and realize half the drawers were empty.

"I..." Adrian swallowed hard. "I can’t remember where I grew up."

The silence that followed was suffocating.

"I know I had a childhood," Adrian continued, his voice rising with panic. "I know I had parents. But I can’t tell you their names. I can’t tell you what my house looked like. I can’t even tell you what city I was born in."

He looked at Kai with wild eyes.

"What’s happening to us?"

Kai felt it too.

That same hollow ache in his chest, that same creeping darkness where memories should have been. He tried to recall his own childhood, his own parents, his own life before the apocalypse.

He got fragments. Flashes. A woman’s laugh. The smell of rain on concrete. The weight of a hand on his shoulder.

But no names. No faces. No details that made any of it real.

"This is what I was scared of," Kai said quietly.

He looked at his friends—his family—and saw the same fear reflected in all of them.

Rowan was still kneeling beside Luna, but his eyes had gone distant. He was trying to remember something. Anything. Kai could see the effort in the furrow of his brow, the way his lips moved silently as though repeating words that kept slipping away.

Ethan stared at the ceiling as if the answers might be written there.

Adrian kept looking around the room like he was searching for pieces of himself that had been scattered across the floor.

And Kai?

Kai felt the absence like a missing tooth. Something that should have been there, that he knew had been there, but was now just a gap.

A wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding.

"We have to remember who we are."

The words left his mouth before he fully understood what he was saying.

The others looked at him.

"Sharing memories," Kai continued, the idea forming even as he spoke. "Telling each other things we’ve never told anyone. The kind of information that makes us who we are. If something is erasing our memories, maybe we can rebuild them. Maybe we can hold onto the pieces that matter."

He paused.

"Maybe we can save ourselves."

The room fell silent again, but this time it was different. This time, the silence was heavy with consideration.

Adrian was the first to speak.

"I’ll go first."

He stepped forward, and Kai saw something in his eyes that he’d never seen before. Fear, yes. But also resignation. The look of a man who had been carrying a weight for so long that he’d forgotten what it felt like to stand upright.

"I killed people."

The words were simple. Direct. Devastating.

"I’ve never told any of you this because I was scared of being judged. Scared you’d look at me differently." Adrian’s hands were shaking. "Before the apocalypse, I had friends. Bad friends. The kind of people who steal and hurt others and make you do things you know are wrong."

He paused, gathering himself.

"I did one of those things. A robbery. It went wrong, and an old woman died. But that isn’t all."

His voice dropped lower.

"One of my friends was bullying a kid. I watched it happen. I didn’t stop it. And when I finally moved to help, the boy was already bleeding badly. He was fifteen years old. I tried to get him to a hospital, but he died before I could."

Adrian’s eyes were wet now, but he didn’t look away.

"He was an only son. His mother had a heart attack when she heard the news. She died too. And the father—" Adrian’s voice cracked. "The father killed himself. I ruined an entire family. Three people dead because I was a coward."

The silence that followed was deafening.

Kai felt something shift in the air. Something intangible but real. Like a door opening in a room he hadn’t known existed.

Adrian took a shuddering breath, and when he looked up, there was something different in his eyes. Something clearer.

"I remember," he said softly. "I remember their faces. The boy and his parents. I remember their names."

He closed his eyes.

"Samuel, Margaret, Joseph."

When he opened them again, there were tears streaming down his cheeks.

"I haven’t said those names in years."

Rowan was next.

He stood slowly, still keeping one hand on Luna’s wrist as though afraid she might disappear if he let go.

"During the first stage of the world disaster," he began, "I was with two people. A guy and a girl. We were running from something—I can’t even remember what now—but it was fast. Too fast."

He swallowed hard.

"We weren’t going to make it. All three of us knew it. And I..."

He trailed off.

"I pushed them."

The words hung in the air heavily.

"I pushed them into the jaws of death to save myself. They died so I could live. And I’ve hated myself every single day since."

He looked down at Luna’s still face.

"James and Clara. Those were their names. They were twenty-three and twenty-one. They had families. People who loved them."

His voice broke.

"And I killed them."

The room seemed to grow darker, heavier. But at the same time, Kai felt something loosening in his chest. Like a knot that had been tied so tight it had become invisible.

Rowan’s eyes suddenly widened.

"I remember," he whispered. "I remember where I was born. I remember my mother’s cooking. I remember..."

He trailed off, lost in the flood of returning memories.

Kai knew it was his turn.

He didn’t want to speak. He didn’t want to share the things he’d buried so deep that even he couldn’t find them anymore.

But if they were going to survive this—whatever this was—he had to.

"I..."

He paused.

The words were there, waiting for him to just say it out loud.

"I’ve never told anyone this."

He looked at his friends, at the people who had become his family, and felt the weight of the truth pressing against his ribs.

"When I was seventeen, I..