Every option ended in blood.
Hers and mine.
I went back to the window and stared at the sunrise. The light was changing, the city sharpening into focus the way it does when the softness of dawn burns off and leaves you with the hard, flat reality of day.
There had to be something else. Some angle I wasn't seeing. Some way we could both get out of this alive.
Something moved at the back of my mind. Not quite a plan. Not yet. More like a shadow. A shape in the dark, too far away to identify but heavy enough to feel. The way you sense a presence in a room before you see it. The way Raven sensed me in that alley before I spoke a word.
It was there. Just out of reach.
And it was dark. Whatever it was, whatever it would cost, it lived in a part of me I'd spent my whole life keeping locked away.
I didn't chase it. Didn't reach for it. Not yet.
My phone vibrated in my pocket and I pulled it out to look at the screen even though I already knew who it was.
Please come home.
Did the darkness she lived in have room for me?
I put the phone face-down on the windowsill.
Then I sat on the couch that a designer had chosen and stared at the wall that a decorator had painted and waited for the shadow at the back of my mind to step into the light.
It would. I knew it would. Because I was my father's son, and when the world closed in around us, we didn't pray or panic or run.
We went to work.
The only question was whether I'd recognize myself when it was over.
CHAPTER 17
RAVEN
He didn't come home.
I lay in the never ending darkness and listened to my apartment do what it always did when I was alone. The refrigerator cycling. The pipes ticking behind the drywall. A car passing on the street below, the rumble of its engine distinct enough to track without thinking.
All the sounds that used to be comforting.
Now they just made me wonder if Viktor was finally coming to get me.
I reached across the sheets. They were cold. His pillow still held a faint trace of him, but it was fading. Becoming just a memory.
I pulled his pillow against my chest and pressed my face into it and breathed him in until my lungs burned, and then I kept breathing, because the alternative was letting go.
Morning bled into afternoon. Afternoon into evening. I checked my phone four times. Five. The screen reader's flat, mechanical voice confirming what I already knew.
No messages.
By the second day, I'd stopped checking. Because every time that robotic voice saidno new messages, the silence afterward was worse than the silence before. Like tearing a scab off something that hadn't really started healing yet.
By the third day, I'd stopped sleeping in the bed. The sheets still smelled like him if I pressed hard enough. Not the clean scent I caught when he walked into a room, but the underneath one. The one that only surfaced when his body was warm and unguarded, when he was asleep or inside me or both, and his skin released something raw and unmasked that I'd never found on another human being.
Sleeping in it was torture. So I moved to the couch and curled into the corner with a blanket that smelled like springtime dryer sheets.
But my body wouldn't let me forget him.
