“Matthias!” I take off running, heels slipping from my feet as I clutch the book and hike my dress, shoving through the crowd as voices shout my name behind me.
She was aiming for me.
That bullet was meant for me.
“Wait!” I scream.
Too late.
The ambulance pulls away, siren blaring once before?—
The explosion rips through the air.
The blast throws me backward, my head slamming into the concrete as fire blooms where the ambulance had been. Sound vanishes, replaced by a thick, underwater silence.
Hands grab me.
I don’t move.
I can’t.
I just stare at the burning wreckage where the pieces of my heart just died.
thirty-nine
Shattered cries surround me.
They come in waves, raw, broken sounds that scrape against my skin. Tearful sobs. Hushed, indistinct murmurs. Voices overlap and fracture, words dissolving before they reach me, like someone trying to talk through a bad phone line with terrible reception.
Everything feels staticky.
Disconnected.
Red lights smear across the wet pavement, reflections rippling in the shallow pools left behind by the hoses. Firefighters move in sharp, urgent motions, their shouts swallowed by the roar of dying flames. Water splashes, steam hisses, and droplets scatter, disrupting the fragile mirror on the street’s surface.
I feel my father before I register him.
The solid heat of his body presses against my back as he drapes his coat around my shoulders, wrapping me in it like ashield. The night air bites at every inch of exposed skin, cold enough to make my teeth chatter, but inside me there is nothing.
No cold.
No heat.
Just numbness.
It spreads slowly, methodically, seeping through my veins and hollowing me out from the inside. The flames licking at the ambulance finally begin to die, shrinking down until all that remains is a blackened, twisted shell. Metal groans as it cools. Smoke curls upward, thick and bitter, clogging the air.
There won’t be anything left of him.
I know that without needing to be told.
Not that it matters.
Vas watched them load him into the ambulance. He was there, every step of the way, until the moment that mattered most. That realization slams into me all at once, and something ugly tears free inside my chest.
Fury erupts.
White-hot.
