Clean it up or don't, but this is what it is.
"You made me believe I was dying, Milo. I felt it, you know. The needle, the cold in my veins, my heart slowing down—I thought that was the end. I thought the last thing I would ever feel was your hand on my face and I?—"
My voice cracked. I hated it. Hated the tremor, hated the weakness, hated that even now, even knowing what I knew, the memory of his hand on my cheek in those final seconds still made something inside me ache.
"I know," he said.
"You don't know. You don't know what it's like to—" I stopped. Pressed my palms into the mattress and breathed through the pain in my ribs and reorganized myself the way I reorganized a room in my mind: systematically, corner by corner, until the geography made sense.
He waited. Didn't fill the silence. Didn't try to touch me. Just waited for me to finish dismantling him or forgiving him or whatever the hell I was going to do.
I laid there in my rage for a long time as it burned hot and then banked. Not completely gone, but settling into coals that would glow for a long time.
And underneath the rage was something so much worse.
Betrayal.
Because the rage was about what he'd done. The betrayal was about who he'd been while he did it. He'd become someone else. The warmth I'd learned to read in his breathing, the gentleness in his hands, the voice that whisperedlittle birdagainst my throat—that man was gone. Replaced with someone cold and mechanical and professional, and he'd done it so completely that I couldn't tell the difference between the two men.
And I didn't know anymore which one was real.
"Were you working with them?" I asked. "Was I just…" I couldn't bring myself to ask it, but his answer was harsh and immediate.
"No. Fuck, Raven. No."
I thought I felt the lightest brush of his fingers on my face, but it was gone before I could be sure.
"No, little bird. The thing with you and me, that was real. I swear to you, it was all real. It still is."
I believed him. It may have been stupid of me, but I did.
"But you're not completely wrong about me," he said quietly. "Iama monster. Deep down, I am. And for that, for what I had to do to get us both out of there alive…I won't apologize. No matter how it kills me to look at you now and see what I did, I won't apologize. Even if you never forgive me. Because the thought of a world without you in it was not acceptable to me, so I did whatI had to do to keep you in it. For me. Because I'm too fucking selfish to let you go."
This time there was something in his voice that I couldn't quite read. Not guilt. Guilt would've been simpler. This was the sound of a man who'd calculated the cost of his actions before he'd started and paid it willingly, and was now sitting in the wreckage. There wasn't even a shred of hope in his tone that he'd come out of it unscathed. Just acceptance of what was.
I lay there for a long time. Long enough that the light through the window must have shifted, because the warmth on the bed moved from my feet to my shins. Long enough that his breathing evened out slightly, then went ragged again, like his body kept trying to stabilize and his mind wouldn't let it.
The things that happened in that building kept replaying over and over in my head. I'd assumed the beating he gave me was random. Methodical but random. But now, with what he'd told me reframing everything, I realized he could've hurt me a lot worse than he did. Instead, he'd hurt me expertly. Professionally. Just enough to sell the performance without destroying what came after.
And he'd never touched my hands. My hands that were everything to me. The only tool I had left.
He'd never touched my hands.
I hated that the logic was sound.
I hated that, even now, even processing this through a fog of pain and fury and drugs still clearing my system, I could see the architecture of what he'd done and recognize it for what it was. Every blow placed to maximize the show for Viktor while minimizing the long-term damage to me.
He'd broken me to save me.
CHAPTER 23
RAVEN
"Ineed you to do something for me," I said.
"Anything."
"I need you to stop talking for a while. And I need to not be touched. Can you do that?"
