Then at the room. Then back at him.
My lip curls.
“Then they should save her faster.”
My voice comes out low. Quiet. The kind that makes men back up.
Vaska doesn’t.
“She is with the doctors.”
“She was with me.”
That one tears out before I can stop it. The room goes dead after that. Because there it is. Not the rage. Not the violence.
The truth under it.
She was with me. And now she isn’t.
I look away from him before he can see too much, but it’s too late for that. Too late for anything.
I drag a bloody hand over my mouth.
“She can’t—” My voice breaks, and I turn it into fury before it can become anything else. “She doesn’t get to fucking die.”
Vaska says nothing.
Smart.
Because if he says the wrong thing, I’ll put him through the wall too, and we both know it.
I look down at my hands again. Red in every line. In every groove. Stuck in me.
Like her.
Etched in. Too deep to cut out. A bitter smile pulls at my mouth, wrong and sharp and wrecked.
“Did we get Arsen?”
Vaska hesitates. “No.”
I take in a painful breath.
“That’s fine. If she dies, I’ll have a lifetime to hunt him like a dog.”
Those words are the cleanest thing I’ve felt since they took her from my arms.
***
The waiting room is too white.
Too clean. Too quiet. Too fucking sterile for a place where people sit around waiting to find out if the person they love is going to live or die.
I sit with my back to the wall, my wrist throbbing inside the cast, every pulse in the bone keeping time with the panic still trying to claw its way up my throat. Purple.
They wrapped the fucking thing in purple.
The first color I ever dyed her hair.
