In this book within a book, plunge into the escapades of Satine Fontaine, who's on the run from her tumultuous past. The vibrant streets of New York beckon her, and fate conspires as she stumbles into Brooklyn's dingiest bar, encountering the enigma...
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STAR: THE VERDICT IS
It's a complicated thing, death. Only because there you are one minute, living with such promise and ambition and then the next you're on a morgue table, lifeless, being identified by your closest friends.
A turn of events like that shouldn't be able to happen so fast.
You're being analysed, stared at, prodded and poked because you look like their loved one but you're vacant and grey. It's confusing for them because you're physically still on earth, looking peacefully content in your slumber but your soul is a million miles away.
The soul is what makes up a human being. When that's gone, you're just an empty shell.
Mingyu hesitantly stood over the body covered by a plastic blue sheet as Hoshi's back clung to the wall behind. It took a long time for him to pluck up the courage to send the mortician a small nod, but once he did, he would have done anything to take back his decision.
The cover was unzipped slowly, and inch by inch the body was revealed. It was gruesome and not at all what Mingyu was expecting.
No one deserves to meet such a fate.
If the person in front of him didn't look so vaguely familiar, he wouldn't have been able to guess his original tone. His skin was bubbled and bloated with a greenish-black hue, and an irregular pattern of burst purple vessels littered his torso and neck, all the way up to his swollen face.
It was him, even though Mingyu refused to believe so at first. He could have easily shaken his head and said no because the person lying on the steel table was not even half the man he once was. If he said no, he could have lived blissfully unaware of his friend's demise. He could have gone about his life convinced he'd moved away for a new beginning.
He couldn't do that though, not after he heard Hoshi's body slide down the wall and a series of incomprehensible cries echo through the morgue once again.
He knew too.
Holding back tears himself, Mingyu brought his palm to his mouth to conceal the shattering in his chest. He could hear his heart breaking and the noise was deafening.
"Yes, it's him," he eventually choked, turning around instantly after saying it.
He couldn't look any longer.
Hoshi found the reality way more brutal. He knew from the moment he answered the phone that it was him. They both had the exact same wallet with the exact same emergency contact placed inside the exact same plastic sleeve.
He roared out at the top of his voice for Mingyu to shut up, repeating it until his throat was sore. He'd heard the word 'no' so many times in his life. Over and over again from women, colleges, jobs, even from his parents, and yet the one time he wished he could hear those two letters was the time he was deprived.
