The room tips.
Logan stays in front of me, eyes hard, face full of something that might be grief if I could process anything beyond the black hole tearing open in my chest.
“They die,” I say. It comes out low. Rough. Barely human.
Logan nods once. “Yeah,” he says. “They die.”
My knees hit the floor. Hands still on me. Holding. Not restraining now. Catching.The black starts closing in, but the last thing I see is the blank laptop screen. Olivia gone from it. Eli gone forever. The men who did it still breathing. For now.
They die slowly.
Not because I’m angry.
Not because I lost control.
Because some men deserve to learn that death can be mercy.
And I’m out of fucking mercy.
For a while, there is no sound. That’s the first thing I understand after. Not where I am. Not what happened. Not what comes next. Just silence. Thick. Heavy. Wrong. The kind of silence that doesn’t mean peace. It means something terrible has already happened, and the world is waiting to see whether you’ll survive knowing it.
My eyes are open, but I’m not seeing much.
The ceiling above me is stained. There’s a crack in one corner that cuts across the plaster like a vein. The light hanging overhead swings slightly, barely moving, but enough to make the shadows shift every few seconds.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
I focus on that because everything else is too much.
My wrists burn. My ankles ache. Every part of my body feels like it belongs to someone else. Too sore. Too exposed. Too heavy. My skin crawls with the need to scrub and scrub and scrub until nothing is left but rawness, but I can’t move enough to do anything about it.
I feel dirty. Not because I did anything wrong. I know that somewhere. Deep down, beneath the shock and the shame and the way my mind keeps trying to turn itself inside out to escape my own body, I know that. But knowing something doesn’t always make it feel true.The room smells like metal and sweat and blood.
Blood.
My eyes move before I can stop them.
Eli.
He’s still there. Slumped against the floor where he fell, too still now, too quiet. His face is turned slightly toward me, and one of his hands is curled near his chest like his body tried to hold onto itself at the end.
My throat tightens until breathing hurts. No sound comes out. I think I used up every scream I had. He came because of me. The thought forms slowly. Then lands. He came because I asked him. He took me to the store because I wanted to do something sweet. Something normal. Something stupidly small for a man who never would have told me it was his birthday.
Eli hesitated. He knew better. He said Cobra would lose his shit. He still took me. Because I asked. Because he wanted to help. Because he thought he could get me there and back before anything happened. And now he’s dead. He died because of me.
My stomach turns so hard I gag, but there’s nothing there. Just pain. Just the awful pull of my body trying to reject a reality it can’t get away from. “No,” I whisper. It doesn’t sound like a word. It sounds like something broken scraping its way out of me.
No one answers.
Not Eli.
Not Cobra.
Not God.
The door opens eventually.
