It’s too bright. Too clean. Too quiet in the way that makes your skin itch—like the walls themselves are holding their breath, waiting for the next tragedy to roll through those automatic doors on a stretcher.
The fluorescent lights hum overhead, steady and unforgiving, buzzing like a swarm of insects gnawing at the edges of my sanity.
I sit slumped in the hardest plastic chair known to mankind, elbows digging into my knees so hard the bones ache, hands clasped together like I’m trying to squeeze blood from stone.
My spine is a crooked question mark.
My chest is a cage with something feral pacing inside it.
Every time those automatic doors hiss open—that pneumatic wheeze like the building itself is sighing—a cold gust rushes in and I flinch like it’s gunfire.
Can’t help it.
My body doesn’t know the difference anymore between wind and violence. Hasn’t for years.
I’ve been here for hours.
Long enough that the blood drying on my knuckles—Xavier’s blood, the same blood I tried to keep inside his body while we waited for help in the middle of nowhere—has begun to crack when I move my fingers.
It flakes off in rust-dark crescents onto the linoleum, quiet as the kind of confession no one wants to hear.
Long enough that the shirt I wore when Valentina and I tore down those back roads—arriving minutes after the gunshots, too late to stop them but early enough to drop to our knees beside him—has gone stiff with sweat and the copper-bright smear of his life leaking through my palms.
The ambulance should have taken twenty minutes to reach that stretch of empty county road, but it took twenty-five.
I remember pressing my hands to the wound, feeling the warmth drain away, hearing Valentina whisper his name like the sound alone might tether him here.
I remember steadying his head when his breathing hitched, trying to keep him conscious, telling him to look at me even though he couldn’t focus on anything at all.
By the time the EMTs arrived, my hands were soaked past the wrists.
And now, sitting in this too-bright hallway, my thoughts have built a cathedral around guilt and locked me inside it—forced meto kneel beneath its hollowed arches and confess every failure, even the ones I haven’t earned yet.
Xavier shouldn’t be alive, not after what we saw.
The fact that he is feels less like a miracle and more like a debt I’ll never stop paying.
This is my fault.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Not in that soft, abstract way people assign blame when they want absolution more than accountability.
Literally.
I can feel it in the marrow of me—guilt threaded into bone like rebar through concrete.
My ribs are made of it.
My spine is shaped by it.
Xavier—my brother, my king, the only person alive who gets to call me family without me breaking their jaw for the presumption—was shot last night.
Two bullets. One in the chest, one in the spine, and enough blood loss to paint a crime scene.
And instead of being where I should’ve been, instead of standing at his back like I was born to do, like I’ve done since I was thirteen years old, I was across the damn city.
Obsessing over a girl who should’ve been a job. A contract. A nothing.
Valentina.
