Theo puts a finger to his lips to hush me while Cody puts a hand over my mouth. He slowly removes his hand, and then Beckett opens the door.
"You think you can just—" I'm still pulling against Theo's hands. "After everything — after what you did, after what I found out in that hospital room — you think you can just walk in here and take me? Like, I'm something you own? Like I don't get a say in my own—"
Theo pulls me into the hallway.
I dig my heels in.
He adjusts his grip without a word and lifts me — actually lifts me, off the ground, one arm across my waist from behind — andI make a sound that is pure outrage. I fight him the entire length of the hallway with everything I have.
It doesn't matter.
He's immovable.
I am fighting with everything — the six weeks of grief and anger and the hollow in my chest, and every night I lie awake thinking about the library and the park and the hospital room — I am putting all of it into fighting him, and he carries me down the hallway like it costs him nothing.
Like he's been waiting for this.
Like he planned for exactly this much resistance and is not surprised by any of it.
We take the stairs.
I grab the railing.
Beckett gently uncurls my fingers.
"Beck." His name is in my mouth like a wound. "Beck, please. Please don't do this. You told me he was a ticking time bomb, you told me not to be there when he exploded, you said—"
He looks at me.
Something moves in his face.
He keeps walking.
Outside, the cold hits me immediately. I’m not prepared for this, and that thought makes me even more livid.
"Where are you taking me?" I ask.
Nobody answers.
None of them has said a single word.
"Tell me where you're taking me." My voice climbing. "You owe me that much. After everything, you owe me at least that—"
The back door of a black car opens.
I look at it.
I look at all three of them.
I look at the door.
"I will never forgive you for this," I say. "I need you to know that. Whatever you think this is going to accomplish — it won't. You cannot force someone to—"
Theo guides me into the car.
I sit because the alternative is falling, and I have too much dignity left for that.
Cody gets in the other side.
