The rage should have been white-hot. Should have been consuming. Should have burned through everything else until there was nothing left but fury and the need for revenge.
But it wasn't.
I felt ... nothing.
Hollow. Empty. Like someone had scooped everything out of me with a dull spoon and left just the shell, still standing but functionally dead inside.
I was glad Merrick was dead. Glad I'd put the rounds in him. Glad I'd watched his face disappear under the impacts, obliterated, erased from existence the way he deserved.
But I didn'tcare.
And that was worse somehow. The not caring. The flat, dead space where emotion should have been. The knowledge that I'd killed a man—multiple men, actually—and felt nothing about it except a vague sense of completion.
Like checking items off a list.
Target neutralized. Threat eliminated. Mission accomplished.
I'd washed my hands three times since getting back to The Sanctuary. Scrubbed until the skin was raw and angry-looking. But I could still feel the recoil of the pistol bucking against my palm. Could still see the blood pooling dark on concrete,spreading in irregular patterns that my brain kept trying to map like terrain.
Could still hear his laugh.
Pretty sure that was your mommy screaming.
The words played on loop. Over and over. A recording I couldn't shut off.
I'd tried sitting. Then standing. Then pacing. Nothing helped. Nothing touched the emptiness or filled the hole that kept getting wider.
The knock came.
Measured. Deliberate. Not hesitant.
Ellsworth.
I crossed to the door and opened it, my movements mechanical. Automatic.
And there she was.
Mila.
Standing in the hallway like light breaking through storm clouds, parting the darkness that had settled over everything like fog.
For a moment I just stared at her, unable to process that she was real. That she'd come. That someone like her—someone clean and whole and good—would choose to step into this mess with me instead of running the other direction like any sane person would.
"Mila," I said, and her name felt like the only solid thing left in my world. The only word that still meant something.
She didn't hesitate.
Didn't ask permission or wait for invitation.
She crossed to me and wrapped her arms around me, her face pressing into my chest, and the contact?—
God, the contact.
It was like touching ground after free-falling through space. Like air after drowning. Like proof that gravity still worked and the world hadn't completely inverted.
My arms crushed around her before I could think about it. Not gentle. Not careful. Desperate.
Like she was the only thing keeping me from disappearing entirely. From dissolving into the emptiness that wanted to swallow me whole.
