Page 36 of Victorious

He supposed he could tell her what to feel, but the idea repulsed him, in a dull way. Everything was dull now.

He reached out, and tucked the hair behind Iris’s ear, letting his palm rest against her cheek, the skin as warm as his.

“I’m sorry I brought you back,” he said. As he spoke, her skin began to hum beneath his palm. A strange ache spread up through his fingers, down his wrist. A familiar pressure building where their bodies met.

Iris parted her lips, as if about to say something.

But all that came out was a sigh before her face gave way beneath the weight of his hand, along the rest of her, her body crumbling like sand beneath his touch.

No, not sand.

Ash.

Gabriel stared at the place where she’d been. At his own hand, now empty again. He hadn’t known that would happen, of course. He hadn’t known, and a shallow ghost of horror washed over him, briefly. Horror, and grief.

But in their wake, relief.

A sense of something settled.

Order restored.

He let out a long, slow breath, and rolled onto his back, the ashes of his wife still curled beside him like a shadow.

Gabriel lay there for several moments in the dark.

And then he got up, and went to find his son.

XVNOW. THEN.

THE NEXT MORNING

LESS than a week after Gabriel Gray destroyed what was left of his wife and son, he heard a car pull up outside. The telltale sound of tires against gravel, disrupting the silence that had settled like a shroud over the house.

He was in the upstairs bathroom, cutting out the last of his stitches when the doorbell rang. It took him nearly a minute to get to the front door. He hoped whoever it was would be gone by then.

But they weren’t.

He opened the door to find two people.

The first was a woman nearly his height, pale and lean in her trim black suit, dark hair hanging in a bob above her shoulders.

The second was a man with the markings of ex-military, straight-backed with close-cropped hair and the faint bulge of a firearm visible beneath his jacket.

“Dr. Gray,” said the woman with a smile that almost reached her eyes. “I’m sorry to bother you.” He doubted that. “But I was hoping we could talk.”

“About what?” asked Gabriel.

The woman met his eyes. “About Paul.”

That’s why you never hear about people like me, Paul had told him that first day. They make ’em disappear.

Gabriel had dismissed the sentiment as paranoia. Now, he wondered if he’d been mistaken. If there was another reason Paul was the first and only patient he’d encountered in his twenty-three years whose trauma translated into something more.

“Dr. Gray.”

She was careful to use his name and title. Polite, verging on deferential.

Still, instinct told Gabriel to shut the door. To lock it. To grab everything he owned—which wasn’t much—and leave. But logic caught up. He was injured. He wouldn’t get far. His gaze slid past them to the vehicle, the windows tinted dark. It was impossible to know if there were more.