And I didn't.
And I couldn't tell the difference anymore.
He didn't respond. But something in his breathing changed. A single hitch, so small that Viktor couldn't have caught it from across the room. A fracture in the rhythm, barely there. Like something inside him had cracked and the sound had leaked out through his lungs before he could seal it shut.
Or maybe I imagined it. Maybe I needed to imagine it. Maybe the woman bleeding on the floor needed to believe that the man standing over her was dying too, just in a way that didn't leave marks.
The ringing in my ears was getting louder. From far away, I heard Milo's voice. Not aimed at me.
Aimed at Viktor.
Words I couldn't separate through the static in my skull. Viktor's voice came back sharp and demanding. They were arguing.
And I lay on the floor and listened to two men argue over how I was going to die.
Through all of it—the pain whiting out my thoughts, the fear that had long since crossed from sharp to numb, the certainty that I was going to die in this warehouse on this floor—one thing stayed locked in a vault so deep that even now, even here, even with my body broken and my mind fracturing and the taste of my own blood thick on my tongue, I would not touch it.
The truth.
It sat in the deepest chamber of my mind like a stone at the bottom of a well, and no amount of pain or terror or heartbreak was going to bring it to the surface. Not for Viktor. Not for the camera. Especially not for Milo.
I would die on this floor and take it with me, because it was the only thing I had left that was mine.
Footsteps approached. Milo's. The argument was over.
He knelt beside me. I felt the displacement of air, the warmth of his body, the familiar geography of his presence descending to my level.
Then I felt something I didn't expect.
His hand touching my face.
The first gentle thing I'd felt from him since this began.
His fingers brushed the swollen ridge of my cheekbone, barely touching me. His thumb tracked the line of my jaw the way it had a thousand times. A touch so careful it felt like an apology spoken in a language that didn't have words.
I flinched. And then I didn't.
Because even now—even after this, even with his knuckles still warm from the bruises he'd put on my body—his hands were the only things that had ever made the darkness feel safe.
And I hated myself for leaning into it.
Something cold pressed against the inside of my elbow. Thin and sharp.
A needle.
"Milo." His name came out broken. The voice of a woman who had already stopped fighting and was making a final accounting of the things she'd carry into whatever came next.
His breathing was ragged now. Shattered. The mask slipping, too late, in the final seconds before whatever this was—mercy or murder—took me under.
The needle slid in.
Cold flooded my vein. A chemical chill that spread from the crook of my elbow up through my shoulder and into my chest, slowing everything it touched. My heartbeat stumbled. My lungs forgot their rhythm. And the pain—the burning, screaming, all-consuming landscape of pain—went quiet. Like someone had pressed a pillow over the world.
His hand stayed on my face as I went under. I could feel it. His fingers against my skin, his palm cradling my jaw, and beneath his touch, the faintest tremor. He was shaking.
The man who'd just beaten me bloody was shaking.
I tried to say something. His name, maybe. Or the word I'd been circling for weeks, the one I couldn't say then and couldn't say now and might never get to say at all?—
