Dimitri. His father. My new stepfather. The call is a lifeline, a divine, sickening intervention.
He turns his back to the closet, pacing towards the window as he listens. "No... I don't care what the board says... Tell them to go to hell."
This is my chance. My only chance.
Slowly, silently, I rise. I clutch the wooden box in one hand. Every muscle in my body is screaming. I slide the closet door open, inch by agonizing inch. The sound is imperceptible, lost under the fury of his voice.
"...if you think for one second you can use this to—"
I am out of the closet, I am in the bedroom. I am a ghost, a wraith, moving through the shadows of his own home. He is still on the phone, his back to me, a furious silhouette against the skyline.
I don't run. I glide. Across the bedroom floor, into the main room, my bare feet making no sound on the cold concrete. The front door is an eternity away.
Click.
The sound of the door latch is a gunshot in the silence.
His voice on the phone stops. The silence that follows is absolute.
I don't look back, I wrench the door open, stumble into the hallway, and slam it shut behind me. I sprint to the service elevator, my thumb mashing the button. The box is a clumsy weight in my arms.
I hear a roar of pure, incandescent rage from inside the loft, followed by the splintering crash of something heavy being thrown against a wall.
The elevator dings, and the doors slide open. I dive inside, whirling around and stabbing the 'close door' button repeatedly.
Just as the doors begin to slide shut, he appears. He bursts from the loft, his face a mask of primal fury, his eyes locking onto mine. He is a vision from a nightmare.
For a fraction of a second, our eyes meet through the closing gap. He sees me, he sees the wooden box in my arms. He sees the truth of my betrayal.
The doors close, and the elevator begins to descend. I have escaped, but I am not free. The hunt is no longer a search.
It's a chase.
Forty
Cassian
Theimageisburnedonto the back of my eyelids.
Her face, pale and terrified, framed by the closing steel doors. Her eyes are wide with a horror that is no longer passive, but sharp and defiant. And in her arms, clutched to her chest like a shield… my mother’s box.
For a full second, my mind refuses to process it. It is a glitch in reality, a waking nightmare. The two halves of my world—theghost girl in the loft and the ghosts in the box are colliding in a way that should not be possible.
Then the doors close, sealing her away, and the spell breaks.
A roar tears itself from my throat, a sound of pure, animalistic fury that is ripped from the deepest part of my soul. I grab the nearest object—a heavy, steel table lamp—and hurl it across the room. It smashes into the concrete wall with a deafening crash of shattering metal and glass, a pathetic echo of the cataclysm unfolding inside me.
The loft is no longer a home or a prison. It is a crime scene. It has been violated. I have been violated.
My feet move on their own, carrying me past the wreckage, past the open bedroom door, straight to the bookshelf. My eyes find the empty space. The space where the box has sat, untouched, for years. A quiet, sacred tomb that I never entered but whose presence was a constant, low hum of pain in the background of my life.
She opened it.
The thought is a physical blow. She put her hands on it, she looked inside.
Aria saw them. She saw Leo’s smile. She saw my mother’s handwriting.
My blood runs cold, the rage momentarily freezing into a solid block of ice in my chest. The recorder.
