Crumples like a puppet with cut strings, hitting the floor beside me with a sound that’s somehow gentle and final all at once.
The world is getting colder. My vision is narrowing, edges going dark and fuzzy like I’m looking through a tunnel that’s slowly closing. Like someone’s dimming the lights one by one until there’s nothing left but a pinpoint of awareness.
I’m dying.
The thought is distant. Clinical. Observational. Like I’m watching this happen to someone else, like my consciousness has already started separating from my body in preparation for whatever comes next.
“Silas!”
That voice.
I know that voice. Would know it anywhere. In any life. In any world.
Hands on my face. On my chest. Pressing against the wounds with desperate pressure that sends fresh pain radiating through my entire torso.
Parker.
But that can’t be right. Parker’s safe. Parker’s with the boys. Parker’s supposed to be miles away from this, protected, safe, alive?—
“Stay with me,” she’s sobbing, and her voice is wrecked, destroyed, the sound of a heart breaking in real time. “Please, Silas, please stay with me. Don’t leave me. Don’t you dare leave me?—”
Her face appears above me, swimming into focus through the tunnel vision. Sea-glass eyes streaming tears that fall on my face like rain. Hair falling around us like a curtain, blocking out the rest of the world.
She’s here.
She’s really here.
She came for me.
I try to say her name, but nothing comes out. Just blood. Just the wet, wrong sound of lungs that don’t work anymore, that are filling with fluid, drowning me from the inside.
“I love you,” she’s saying, and the words pour out of her like a flood, like she’s been holding them back for six years and can’t contain them anymore. “I love you, I love you, I love you. You don’t get to die. You don’t get to leave me again. Not like this. Not ever. Do you hear me? Silas, I love you?—”
I want to say it back. Want to tell her so many things. That she’s everything. That the boys need her. That she makes me want to be something other than the monster my father created. That loving her is the only thing I’ve ever done that felt right.
But the words won’t come.
The cold is spreading too fast now, moving through my veins like ice water. Up my arms. Down my legs. Into my chest where my heart is barely beating, each pulse weaker than the last.
Her voice is getting further away. Fading like she’s moving down a long hallway even though I can still see her face above me, can still feel her hands trying to hold me together.
Everything’s fading.
The sound. The light. The pain.
All of it draining away like water through a sieve.
I’m sorry, firefly.
I’m so sorry I couldn’t be what you needed. Sorry, I let you down. Sorry, I won’t get to see our boys grow up, won’t get to teach them how to ride or how to fight or how to love someone so much it terrifies you.
The darkness takes me.
Gentle. Final. Complete.
And everything goes quiet.
55
