“I saw you as a fucking brother,”I forced out. The sentence came apart in my mouth before I finished it. I swallowed hard, tried to keep going, but the words didn’t line up anymore.
“But you… you,”
My throat locked completely. I opened my mouth again, but nothing came out. Not even a sound, just air hitting something that wouldn’t move. I tried again, pushing harder, forcing it. It felt like hitting a wall inside my own body. Like something old had found its way back into place and decided for me that I was done speaking. My hands curled into fists so hard my fingers started to ache, but it didn’t ground me, didn’t fix it. If anything, it just made it worse, because he could see it.
Of course he could.
Have you ever had that happen, little Ghost?
That moment where you have everything right there, right on the edge of your tongue, and then your body just refuses. Like it remembers something you don’t want it to remember, like it decides for you that silence is safer. I hated it. I hated him for seeing it. And I hated myself even more for not being able to push past it. He didn’t come closer, didn’t reach out. Nothing. Just that look, wrong on him, like someone had put the wrong expression on the wrong face.
“... that’s not true, Rowan.”
That was it, but it was enough to break something. It came out of nowhere, like my body skipped whatever warning it was supposed to give me. My chest hitched hard, once, likesomething pushing air out of me and then it just kept happening. Again, again, too fast, no rhythm, no control.
A sound tore out of me. I didn’t even recognize it as mine at first. It was too raw, too exposed. Like something that had been buried too long and didn’t know how to come out without tearing something open. I folded in on myself without thinking– shoulder pulling forward, spine curling like I was trying to make myself smaller, disappear into it, hide it. But it didn’t fucking work.
Another sound forced its way out, louder this time, cracked, turning into something that barely resembled a breath by the end of it. I tried to inhale, but it caught halfway, like something inside my chest just refused. I sucked in air again, trying harder this time, but it didn’t go anywhere. My hands came up, fingers pressing hard into my face, dragging down like I could pull myself back together physically if I just… No. No, nothing held. It spilled. Everything did. And I hated it. I hated the sound of it, hated how open it felt, how fucking visible it made me.
There was no control left in it, no way to force it back into something smaller and easier to hide. It was just there and he could hear all of it.
Little Ghost, don’t look at me like that. Don’t… no, keep looking. You always do. That’s the thing about you, isn’t it? You don’t leave when it gets like this. You stay, you watch, you take it in like it belongs to you. Fuck. There’s something wrong with you too and I like that more than I should.
Zwierek’s voice reached me eventually, but it didn’t pull me out of it. It just sank into the mess already filling my head. Like it had to push through everything coming out of me just to reach me.
“Rowan… I tried to help you.”
The words hit me and disappeared just as fast, swallowed by everything else tearing through my head at the time.
“It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”I heard it, I know I did. But it felt distant, like it was happening in another room and I just happened to catch pieces of it through a wall. Nothing lined up, nothing stayed still. My vision smeared, like someone had dragged a hand across everything I was looking at and ruined the edges. The outline of him kept shifting whenever I tried to focus on it, my eyes unable to settle on where he was actually standing. I dropped. My knees hit the ground and the impact should’ve hurt more than it did, but it barely registered. Everything else drowned it out.
I stayed there, hunched forward, one hand braced against the floor, the other clutching at my chest like I could grab hold of whatever was going wrong inside me and force it to slow the fuck down. It didn’t, it only got worse. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it felt uneven, like it was skipping something, like it couldn’t keep up with itself anymore.
I tried dragging air back into my lungs, but my body kept fighting me for it. Everything felt wrong. My heartbeat, my thoughts, the room around me, the house we were in, the fucking basement. It was like my whole body had lost track of how to function properly.
Then, for one brief moment, something ugly slipped into my head. The hope that maybe this would finally be enough to end it. Everything. The noise, the feeling, the way my body wouldn’t listen anymore, the way my head couldn’t hold onto anything long enough to make sense of it, just stop. My fingers tightened in my shirt knuckles going white, like I needed something solid to just remind myself I was still there. I was still trapped in it, and that was the worst part. Nothing crashed or gave out. It just kept going, second after second, while I sat there unable to pull myself free from it.
The Irrevocable
Chapter 35
When he finally spoke to me again, my brain barely caught up with it. I’d been sitting on the floor for so long my legs felt dead beneath me, my body stiff enough to hurt when I shifted. At some point the light in the room had changed, the shadows stretching across the walls in a way that told me hours had passed, but I couldn’t remember a single second of it.
There was a dark mark in the wood in front of me. My eyes kept dragging back to it over and over again, following the same line until it started feeling like the only thing keeping my head from splitting apart completely. I wasn’t even thinking about it anymore. I just needed something to keep me there.
“Rowan.”He said my name, but it felt far away, muffled by everything else going on inside my head. It wasn’t enough to pull me back. My body stayed exactly where it was, heavy and useless against the floor.“Can you hear me?”
I blinked once, like my eyes had to remember how to do it.
“... Yeah.”The word came out weak, unfamiliar in my mouth.
Then everything went still again, except this time I could feel him there behind me. I didn’t need to look to know how he was standing. Keeping his distance like he had for the past few days, like he thought getting too close might make the whole thing worse. He hadn’t pushed, not after my pathetic breakdown. He’d moved around me instead. Given me space in a way that didn’t feel kind, more like he was waiting. Watching from a step back instead of right in front of me.
“You said he talked to you,”he said after a bit, calm and even.“Your father.”That reached me somehow. My eyes finally pulled away from the mark on the floor, blurry at first before they slowly started catching on other things around the room. Theedge of a chair. One of the legs had a long scratch carved into the side of it. I swallowed hard.
“Yeah.”A few seconds dragged by before he continued.
“... Did he say anything about your mother?”
