My hands curl into fists at my sides.
“I don’t get to decide what this bond means for you,” I add hoarsely. “But I get to decide what it means for me.”
I straighten.
I turn back toward the terminal.
“I choose you,” I whisper.
The words feel less like romance and more like a death warrant.
The jalshagar eases.
Just slightly.
Like it heard me.
Like it knows I chose correctly.
CHAPTER 7
KIMBERLY
The footage loops again on the cracked tablet screen balanced against my knees, the audio muted because I cannot handle the sound of my own life being destroyed in surround-sound.
The Fierson Grill sits in the frame like a corpse that hasn’t been properly covered yet, a blackened, hollowed-out shell with its front windows blown clean out and its sign hanging at a crooked, obscene angle that makes my stomach flip every time I look at it. The kitchen roof has collapsed inward, folding down over the prep line like a crushed rib cage, and even through the grainy compression I can see the soot patterns where the fire raced up the walls and then starved itself out on concrete and broken steel.
Ash drifts through the footage in lazy, weightless spirals.
It looks almost peaceful.
I clench my jaw so hard my molars start to ache.
Loop.
The camera angle shifts slightly as the drone operator drifts closer, and I see my front counter split clean in half where something heavy hit it at speed, stainless steel peeled back like a tin can lid. My dad’s stupid chipped blue coffee mug is stillsitting there, miraculously intact amid the wreckage, because of course it is, because the universe has a deeply unfunny sense of irony.
Loop.
I taste blood.
Not because I’m bleeding.
Because I’m grinding my teeth like I’m trying to chew through my own rage.
Loop.
The tablet vibrates in my hands as a comm request pings in.
I don’t answer it.
I already know who it is.
Mara.
It goes to voicemail.
Her message starts playing automatically because I forgot to turn that feature off and now I am being personally victimized by my own poor settings choices.
