War.
Trey starts pacing.
It isn’t frantic, not on the surface, not in the way anyone else might unravel under pressure, but there is something coiled and volatile in the way he moves, in the measured stride that eats up the space between one end of the room and the other, his hands flexing at his sides like he is already imagining them around someone’s throat.
Find him.
The words echo, reverberating through me until they become something else entirely.
Find him.
My chest tightens.
No—no, no, no.
A cold, suffocating dread floods my veins so quickly it feels like I’ve been plunged beneath ice, like I am back there, back in that basement, back on my knees with blood coating my hands, his blood, Trey’s blood, soaking into everything, staining everything, and I can’t—I can’t do that again.
I can’t watch him die again.
The room starts to shift.
At first, it’s subtle, just a slight distortion at the edges of my vision, like the world is tilting on an axis I can’t quite correct, butthen the noise begins to stretch and warp, voices overlapping, blurring together until I can’t separate one from the other.
Chace is speaking.
Mac says something sharp.
Logan swears.
Niko’s voice cuts in, low and controlled.
But it all sounds far away.
Like I’m underwater.
My grip on the coffee cup loosens, my fingers suddenly numb, and I focus on that, on something small, something manageable, because I cannot fall apart right now, not here, not in front of all of them, not when everything already feels like it’s teetering on the edge of something catastrophic.
Breathe.
I try.
God, I try.
But my lungs won’t cooperate, each inhale shallow and incomplete, like my body has forgotten how to do something so basic, something so necessary.
My heart is racing too fast.
Too loud.
A violent, relentless rhythm that drowns everything else out.
Trey is still pacing.
Still moving.
Still thinking about going after Gideon.
And all I can see—all I can feel—is the echo of him lying on that floor, unmoving, lifeless, his blood on my hands as I begged him not to leave me.
