Leyla collapses into me, shaking so hard it feels like her bones might rattle apart, and I wrap my arms around her without thinking, dragging her down and away, my heart trying to punch its way out of my chest.
But my eyes are already on Zack.
The choice I couldn’t make before snaps into place with terrifying clarity.
I leave Leyla with Cameron and move.
I’m at Zack’s side in seconds, dropping to my knees, hands already pressing hard against his abdomen, my brain locking into action because panic doesn’t get a vote right now. Blood seeps hot and fast between my fingers, and I swallow hard, forcing myself not to think about how much there is.
“Hey,” I say, my voice shaking despite my effort. “Hey—baby please, stay with me.”
His eyes flutter, then focus. “You…didn’t listen,” he rasps.
I laugh, a broken, hysterical sound that surprises both of us. “I never do.”
Behind me, there’s the sound of bodies hitting concrete, of Cameron shouting Leyla’s name, of Alex swearing low and furious as she scrambles back, recalculating in real time. I don’tlook. I can’t. Everything I am narrows to the man bleeding beneath my hands, to the fact that I chose him and I would choose him again even knowing what it costs.
“You’re not allowed to die,” I tell Zack fiercely, tearing fabric, applying pressure, doing anything that buys us seconds. “Not today. Not like this.”
His mouth curves faintly, painfully. “B-bossy.”
“Damn right.”
Somewhere above us, the warehouse screams with chaos, the careful silence finally shattered beyond repair, and I know that feeling, deep in my bones—that Alex didn’t lose because she underestimated our strength.
She lost because she believed choice meant isolation.
Because she forgot that love doesn’t always hesitate, sometimes it lunges. In the chaos of it all, in what seems only like a flash of life, Alex is gone; she’s run off. Leyla’s checking over Cameron, knowing that the gun had gone off again, but it missed Cameron, he’s okay.
“Zack—Zack, baby, please…c’mon Gramps, you can’t leave me, okay?” I try to keep as much pressure onto his wound, but Zack is pale, his face fully leeched of color, and I see his life leaving him. His head lolls back against the concrete wall, a small smattering of blood on it, where at some point it seems that he hit his head.
“H-Hazel? T-take…take care of Sammy for me?” His voice is barely a rasp, and I see the tears fall down his cheek. It’s then I notice Cameron and Leyla standing behind me, it’s one of those moments that almost totally don’t feel real. “I—I love y-you...”
“No, Zack, save it—for when you’re okay. Tell me when you’re not on your fucking deathbed, you hear me?! Help is coming...” Though I don’t know that, I just need him to hang on, just for a little bit longer.
Zack’s eyes close as I hear the sound of sirens in the distance, and I know that it’s going to be okay. We didn’t come this far for him to die on me now.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
BARELY BREATHING
ZACK
Idon’t know when I stopped feeling the pain.
One second it’s everywhere, white-hot, screaming, pulling me under, and the next it’s gone, replaced by a strange, floating quiet that doesn’t feel like sleep so much as suspension. Like I’ve been set down gently somewhere that isn’t a place at all.
Sound comes first. It’s not clear, not all at once. It’s just pieces. A rhythmic beeping that repeats with maddening consistency. Muffled voices that slide past me without sticking. The hiss of something mechanical breathing where my lungs should be, a sharp pain that comes and flows away too quickly for me to process it.
I try to open my eyes.
Nothing happens.
That should scare me. It doesn’t. There’s a calm here I don’t trust, but I don’t fight it, either. Fighting has always been my instinct—against rooms, against odds, against inevitability—butright now, I’m too tired to push. So I drift instead, half-aware, half-lost, floating in the space between holding on and letting go. It’s finally quiet, here there doesn’t seem to be any pain or suffering, I’m just floating on by, and I am more than okay with this.
Images come and go like reflections on water.
Michigan winters. Gray skies. The sound of my mother laughing in the kitchen before everything shattered. My father’s hand on my shoulder, heavy and grounding. Sam at three years old, standing too still in a hallway that smelled like hospital disinfectant, looking at me like I had answers I didn’t know how to give.
