The words move through me slowly, too slowly, as if my mind has to force each one into place with shaking hands. A few days means darkness longer than sleep. A few days means my body failed hard enough that life kept moving while I disappeared. A few days means the last thing I saw was him frantically running toward me, the image burned inside my mind.
My father’s gaze drops briefly to the blanket over my waist, to the place where pain is still throbbing under gauze and stitches.
“Your injuries were worse,” he says, the sentence nearly breaking him in half. “Much worse.”
Memory begins to break the surface after that in vicious little shards.
The parking lot. Kadin’s face. The pipe. Silas falling. The motel. The mask coming off. That man’s eyes. The way he tore into us. All the blood... so much blood.
The word leaves my mouth before I can stop it.
“The Handler.”
My father’s expression hardens immediately. Not with surprise. With cold certainty.
“He’s dead,” he whispers.
No softness. No room left around it. Just finality.
The sentence hangs there for a beat before he adds, more quietly, “Silas made sure of it.”
Relief should come first. It doesn’t. What comes first is the image of Silas hurt, bound, poisoned, then somehow still finding enough violence in himself to make that statement true. Relief follows, but it is tangled up in fresh horror, in gratitude sharp enough to hurt, in the sick knowledge that he carried the worst of me into that room and came back with blood on him.
Another name rises after that, rougher, stranger.
“My mom…”
My mother answers me this time.
“Buried again,” she says, tears spilling immediately. “Properly. She’s gone.”
Gone.
The word does not bring peace. Not yet. Too much wreckage still sits between me and anything like peace. Still, something in my chest shifts. The thought of her body no longer being in hishands, no longer dragged through my life as one more cruelty meant only for me, opens a small space inside all the panic.
A hand scrapes through my hair, fingers snagging uselessly on tangles. Every thought feels too loud. Only one thing remains simple.
Need.
I Need him. I Need his voice. I Need to see him breathing with my own eyes before the terror that has fused itself to my bones loosens even an inch.
“I need to see Silas.”
The words leave me, instantly turning into action. Blankets shove downward. My body tries to rise before sense can intervene. Pain answers immediately, monstrous and white-hot, slicing through my side so brutally that the room flashes around the edges. A cry breaks from me before I can swallow it.
My mother reaches for me at once. “Honey, no, you need to stay down.”
The sound that comes back out of me surprises even me.
“No.”
The word cracks through the room with more force than my body should have left.
My mother stills. My father’s face tightens. Neither interrupts when the rest comes pouring after it, because there is no holding back now that the fear has split open properly.
“No, you don’t get to ask that of me right now,” I say, voice shaking so hard it almost shakes apart. “Not after all this. Not after that room. Not after waking up and not seeing him here.”
Tears come fast enough to blur everything, but they do nothing to slow the words.
