“Many bastards backstabbed,” he says, but I don’t process it because my eyes are fixed on the man I shot in the chest. He is now raising his gun, pointing it at Matleon. I don’t think twice before pushing him to the side with all the force I can muster. He moves a little, just enough to avoid the bullet.
But not me. I stagger back as if hit by a sledgehammer to the chest. My chest tightens, the air knocked out of me. Two strong arms grab me. The shock settles in my head. I see Matleon’s face clearly. He’s shouting something, but it doesn’t reach my ears. I take short, desperate inhales. Drawing a full breath is impossible. My chest feels crushed.
Matleon is crying, tears falling somewhere I can’t reach. I want to hold his cheek to tell him not to cry, but my limbs won’t move. The pain spreads across my chest, searing, as if every breath could be my last. My eyes squeeze shut.
Am I going to die? Is that why Matleon is crying?
I grab his shirt and pull his face down to mine.If I’m going to die, I need him to know that I love him.And that I forgive him. I want him to know that I’ve always loved him, first like a girl lost in daydreams, then through the pain of heartbreak, thenin anger when he forced his way into my life, and finally in the surrender of his love.
I want to tell him everything I never said, everything I kept buried, but no sound comes out. My voice refuses me.
I try to force my eyes open, but even that fails. Darkness starts pulling me under.
I hate darkness—when it isn’t the darkness of my Matleon.
chapter 43
Matleon
They say Matleon gets everything he wants. What they should say is that Matleon loses everything he wants the most.
First, I lost her heart. Then I lost the hope of ever getting her heart back. And now, I’ve lost her.
I felt hollow when I lost her smile, an emptiness that carved itself beneath my ribs but stayed tolerable, like a wound I could press a hand over and keep walking. Then I lost hope, and the hollowness became unbearable. It felt like it might kill me. And now, after I sent her into that room right in front of my eyes, and she stopped breathing, the hollowness has swallowed me whole. It isn’t inside me anymore. I’m inside it. It’s a pit. A grave. And I’m falling, never hitting the bottom.
Her father is sitting across from me. He’s in pain, I can see it in his wet eyes, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel his pain. I don’t feel mine either. I don’t feel anything.
There’s only numbness, spreading from my chest outward, until even my hands feel like they don’t belong to me anymore. Like my body has already started shutting down, preparing for a world where she doesn’t exist.
Someone touches my shoulder. I turn my head. It’s Zo. He sits on the bench beside me.
“There are chances of her saving,” he says.
I stare back at the door. My gut twists so hard I fold forward. Chances mean she might live. Chances mean she might not leave me. Chances mean this isn’t the end, but chances also mean she could choose to go.
She never said she wanted to stay with me.What if she decides to punish me like this for everything I did?
What if this is her way of leaving?
What if this is what I deserve?
My chest seizes, and suddenly the pain floods in. Unbearable pain. It isn’t a heart, it’s a fist punching through me from the inside, over and over.
I drag both hands to my head and dig my fingers into my hair. My body curls in on itself. I can’t breathe right.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out, the words scraping my throat raw. “I’m sorry… please don’t punish me like this.”
Tears spill before I even realize I’m crying. They fall onto my pants. My shoulders shake. I can’t hold anything in anymore.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper again and again—to the sterile floor, to the girl whose innocent heart I broke, to the woman I couldn’t protect. “Please… please don’t leave me. I can’t… I can’t do this without you.”
I keep begging for her forgiveness when she can’t even hear me. I bow my head, shaking, drowning in the one thing I never thought I could feel, grief so deep it feels like it’s trying to hollow me into a corpse beside her.
“Leo.”
“Leo.”
“Matleon.”
