A few paces away, his father lies unnaturally still, the weapon out of reach, the kind of silence settling over him that only comes when a monster stops moving for good. Dead. Finished.
And it doesn’t feel like justice.
It feels like a debt, one that’s been gathering interest for years, finally collected in the only currency that ever mattered in our world.
Bodies. Ruin. Aftermath.
Smoke curls from Liam’s gun as it slips from his fingers and hits the floor with a dull, heavy thud, like even metal can’t bear to stay in his hands for another second.
We were too late.
I knew it the second Khai and I split, knew in that cold, instinctive way you know a blade is already falling. I’d run for Liam like dragging him here could change the ending, like bringing a ghost back into the room might keep the living from becoming one.
But the room doesn’t care about prayers.
Liam is on his knees beside Khai, shaking so hard his whole body looks like it might come apart. His hands hover, unable to decide whether to hold Khai or break themselves against him. His face is wrecked, raw disbelief carved into every line, as if surviving wasn’t enough to prepare him for what survival costs.
“No,” he keeps whispering, over and over, like the word has teeth. Like it can bite through time and pull it backward. “No, Khai, please…”
He looks up at me once, eyes wild and ruined, and the sound that comes out of him isn’t speech, its grief given a voice. “I was too late,” he chokes, each syllable collapsing under the weight of it. “I came back… I came back and I was too late.”
He tries to gather Khai closer, frantic, desperate, as if pulling him in could anchor him here. As if a brother’s arms can stitch a soul back into a body with shaking hands and heartbreak.
I grab Liam under the arms and haul him back.
Not gently. Not kindly.
Because if I don’t, he’s going to crawl inside this moment and drown in it.
“Liam,” I snarl, the name ripping my throat open. “Look at me.”
He fights me like something feral, broken and panicked, reaching for Khai with desperate fingers, sobbing like the air has turned to glass in his lungs. “I’m sorry,” he keeps whispering, again and again, as if apology is a rope he can throw across the distance. As if Khai can hear him. As if guilt can build a bridge back from the edge.
I drag him another step, my own vision blurring, my heart splitting clean down the middle as I stare at Khai on the floor, because that’s what he is to me, too. Brother. Home. The only constant in a life built on blood.
And the only thing louder than Liam’s grief…
…is the awful, absolute silence where Khai should have been breathing.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Khai
Beep… beep… beep…
“Hello, Khai.”
Beep. Beep. Beep.
My head feels thick, heavy, like I’m trying to surface from deep water.
Where am I?
“It’s day nine.”
Why does everything sound muffled? Distant. Like I’m hearing it through layers of glass.
“You’ve been extubated today.”
