I spat—blood and saliva flying from my mouth to splatter against his pristine sandals.
The guards stiffened.
Chapo didn’t even blink.
He looked down at the mess at his feet, then back at me, expression unchanged. If anything, he seemed amused.
Behind him, two guards grabbed Elena by the arms and hauled her upright. She’d been crumpled on the floor, a shaking wreck, eyes swollen, face smeared with Amy’s blood. She looked smaller now. Younger. Like a child who had done somethingunforgivable and didn’t yet understand that there was no undoing it.
“Where are you taking me?” she sobbed, twisting weakly against their grip. “You promised—you said I’d go free! You said—please—please, let me go!”
Her voice cracked completely. She reached out toward me once, fingers trembling, but I turned my head away.
I couldn’t look at her.
The guards dragged her toward the side door. Her cries echoed down the corridor, fading with each step until they dissolved into nothing but memory.
Silence rushed in to fill the space she left behind.
Just me.
The monster.
And my dead sister.
“Just kill me,” I whispered. The words felt scraped raw from my lungs. “You took the only person who mattered. Just end it.”
Chapo regarded me for a long moment.
“No,” he said simply. “Death would be a mercy. And I am not a merciful man.”
As he spoke, memories I had buried deep surged forward, sharp and merciless.
I was ten. Amy was seven.
Summer in Virginia, cicadas screaming in the trees. She’d wiped out on her bike at the end of the gravel drive, skin torn open, blood running down her shin. She tried to be brave, but her lip trembled.
I carried her piggyback all the way home while she laughed through her tears, her arms locked tight around my neck as if letting go might break something fragile between us.
“My knight,” she’d called me, her voice thick with pride.
That night, she fell asleep on my bed, clutching my hand like it was an anchor. In the dark, barely awake, she whispered, “You’ll always protect me, right, Rus?”
And even though I knew she was already drifting, that she couldn’t hear me, I whispered back anyway, “Yes.”
I remembered when I was fifteen and she was twelve, our parents fighting again.
Father shouting about duty, about sacrifice.
Mother crying quietly, like she didn’t want the sound of it to exist.
Amy slipped into my room after midnight without a word and crawled under my covers, cold and shaking.
We stayed awake until dawn, whispering about running away—somewhere warm, somewhere far.
Maybe California. A place where no one would turn us into weapons. I promised the darkness I’d get her out.
I remembered when we shipped out for Greece.
