It’s her behind this door, fracturing alongside the broken objects.
I lift my palms to brace against the frame of the door, my forehead lowering until it rests against the wood.
If she opened this door and saw me standing here, I’d likely be the last person she’d want in her space, seeing her break down.
I’m not built for soft words. I’ve never been able to stitch comfort into anything I say.
Yet the sound of her channeling her grief into fury is one I’m well acquainted with. I know that sound because I’ve lived it, because it’s the only thing that’s ever kept my lungs working when the weight of my parents’ deaths tried to drown me.
The truth I don’t want to admit out loud crawls through me anyway: I want to be there for her. Not because I can fix this for her and not because I think I have the words to soothe her–but because if she needs a person to snarl at and direct her anger at, I know I can be that for her.
The thought shocks me, accompanied by a small trace of yearning that curls tightly in my chest where I shouldn’t have room for it. I don’t know when I started wanting anything except breaking free of Terrance and getting vengeance, but the desire to be next to her is here all the same, and it’s louder than my better judgment telling me to walk away.
Another crash sounds alongside a broken sob.
I breathe out as my fingers curl slowly around the doorknob.
I shove the door open, braced for whatever storm waits for me on the other side.
Maybe I can’t give her peace, but I can give her an outlet that keeps her from breaking alone.
CHAPTER 26
BRIAR
The shattered vase lies in glittering shards across the floor, water soaking into the rug in uneven blotches, stems of crushed flowers bent and broken under my bare feet. My chest heaves with the force of my sobs, each one tearing through my healing throat, ripping it to shreds once more.
After showering and rinsing off any remnants of this godforsaken night and drinking the remaining blood bags I had stashed in my room, my body’s already healing from the faint trace of the mist that began to eat at my shins and burned my throat and lungs. I should feel happy that my body is healing, but all it does is make my guilt thicken.
My mom won’t be that lucky. I know they’ll starve her and bleed her, extending any healing process. She suffers while I heal.
The walls of this room feel too close, like they’re pressing in, and no matter how much I scream, it doesn’t strip the suffocating weight from my chest.
My hands sting from the things I’ve already broken between them, palms nicked where ceramic sliced skin, but I barely feel it over the storm roaring inside me. I don’t deserve to feel whole. I deserve to feel every ounce of pain she’s enduring because of me.
The memory of the mist swallowing my mother and her screams replay again and again, until I want to claw my own face apart just to be rid of it.
I don’t hear the door open, my own heartbeat in my ears drowning everything out, but I feel a presence watching me. I whirl as my eyes snap open, swollen and burning, and there he is…Elias. Standing inside the threshold of my bedroom, the door shut behind him now, with his stormy blue gaze locked on me like he’s ready to fight.
For a second I can’t breathe as fury sparks white-hot under my skin at the sight of him intruding in my space like this, uninvited.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” My voice is hoarse, undermining the weight I try to put behind my words.
The words may be harsh, but the truth is I’m stunned that it’s him standing in my room.
When I first stepped through the portal to our castle, I managed to choke out the bare bones of what happened with my mom. My fathers had initially tried to console me, but their hands felt too heavy on my shoulders, their voices crowding me until I couldn’t breathe. I escaped to my room because their comfort felt like suffocation and something I didn’t deserve.
But since then, there’s been silence from them. Not one knock at my door, not one voice asking if I need them. They must be downstairs now, pouring over strategies, calling in contacts, doing everything they can to get my mom back.
That’s where their attention belongs. I know that. I repeat it like a mantra, but still, some small, selfish part of me aches. A piece of me that hates how badly I wanted them to come check on me again, to sit with me through this. I swallow the guilt of even thinking it, but it lingers anyway.
Seeing Elias standing there as I ached for someone to come check on me feels like the universe laughing in my face, sending the least emotionally-nuanced person I’ve ever met.
His gaze softens as it sweeps over me and fixates on my bleeding hands. Somehow that’s all it takes for my mind to conjure the memory of him pressing against me in the car as we escaped, in an effort to shield me, and then when he took a bullet for me.
He hadn’t hesitated. He’d put himself between me and the gun like it was instinct.
The thoughts press at the edges of my heart, unwelcome and disarming all at once. I don’t know what it is about him that unsettles me every time we’re in the same room or why he sparks a fire within me that no one else has ever brought out.
