I try his neck. No heartbeat. And his skin is cold under my fingers.So cold.
The truth crashes over me in one brutal wave, and I drop back onto my ass, hands shaking uncontrollably now. My mouth opens, but no sound comes out—my throat is clamped shut. Then my brain catches up with what my body already knows, everything hitting me all at once—what I’m seeing, what it means, what’s just been ripped away from me.
Another hard squeeze clenches around my heart, knocking a gasp out of me as hot tears sting my eyes, blurring my vision. My mouth opens wider, and a small, broken whimper escapes when I finally accept the reality in front of me.
He’s gone. Afrim is dead.
The sweet old man who treated me with kindness, who played chess with me and talked about poetry and made me feel safe for the first time in years—he’s dead.
Then a scream tears out of me—loud, raw, impossible to contain. The kind that shreds your throat and keeps going even when you’re out of breath, even when your lungs burn, even when you know it won’t bring him back.
19
ROAN
“Have you heard back from Fabian about the meeting today? We need to?—”
The rest of my words are cut off by a scream so loud and raw it freezes me mid-sentence.
Dhimitër and I lock eyes for half a heartbeat, and I see my own fear reflected back at me in his eyes. Then we’re both shooting out of our chairs, whatever we’d been discussing completely forgotten.
“That came fromShefi’soffice,” Dhimitër says, already halfway down the hall before I can even process the words.
My stomach twists violently, but I’m right behind him, dread sinking into my bones with every pounding step. That scream—I’ve heard people scream before, heard them beg and cry and break, but this was different. This was the sound of someone’s world ending.
We round the corner at a dead sprint and burst into my father’s office, barely slowing down—and then I see her.
Katie’s on the floor, hands pressed desperately against my father’s chest, her voice cracking and breaking over the same repeated words. “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”
She looks up at me with eyes so full of tears I can barely make out the blue, and suddenly I can’t breathe properly because I’ve never seen that expression on her face before—not from her, not from anyone. Pure panic. Pure helplessness.
“He’s not waking up,” she says, and her voice is so small, so broken, it struggles to reach my ears.
My heart drops through the floor. Through the earth. Into some endless void.
I move forward, but it feels like I’m walking through thick mud, every step slow and heavy and wrong, because some part of me already knows what I’m about to see. But I have to see it anyway. Have to be absolutely sure before I let myself believe it.
“What did you do?” Dhimitër growls somewhere behind me, but the words feel distant, like they’re not meant for me, not even meant for her—just angry sounds he needs to make because he’s afraid of what this moment means.
Katie’s voice splinters as she answers. “I—I didn’t do anything. He was sleeping in his chair and I tried to wake him and he just—he just slumped to the floor. I didn’t—I swear I didn’t?—”
I drop to my knees beside my father’s still form and reach for his wrist. Please.
I don’t even know who I’m begging. If there’s truly a god or something listening in—Please.
His skin is cold under my touch. Not cool. Cold. The kind of cold that tells me he’s been gone longer than a few minutes. There’s no pulse, nothing. I press harder, willing my fingers to find even the faintest flicker of life. When that fails, I switch to his neck. Still nothing.
My whole body goes rigid, and a thick, suffocating lump lodges itself in my throat. “Call for Jonas,” I manage to rasp out, not taking my eyes off my father’s pale face, and I hear someone rush out of the room.
But I already know. Deep in my gut, in that place wheretruth lives before your mind catches up, I know what his cold skin means. I know that no pulse means no heartbeat, no blood pumping through his veins, no life left in his body that used to hold such warmth and strength. He’s gone. My father is gone.
My throat burns like someone poured acid down it and my chest feels like it’s actively caving in on itself. All I can think is that I wasn’t here. I wasn’t by his side when it happened. I didn’t get to say goodbye.
I saw him sitting here earlier. Probably thinking about what book to read next or planning to take one of his slow, meditative afternoon walks around the garden that he loved so much. And now he’s on the floor and I can’t fucking feel his pulse and he’s not breathing and he’s not waking up and?—
This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.
Not like this. Not yet.
