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“Isn’t it?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t understand what they do to you, and that’s not your fault. Damian probably didn’t even tell you.”

“I get that they make your life hell if you don’t do what they want. I get it. But—”

Kai rubbed his thumb across his knuckles, not looking at me. “They start when you’re so young that by the time you think about getting out, the thought doesn’t just make you scared, it makes you feel sick. Because you already know that leaving will stop someone else from breathing… your sister, your cousin, your best friend at school. They make sure every exit has a body behind it. And the dead thing they dumped on your doorstep? That’s nothing. Try finding your wetsuit hanging in the shower, sliced open from throat to groin, with a photo of the only woman you ever loved pinned to it. Or coming home to every burner on your stove turned on, the whole kitchen stinking like gas, and a matchbook sitting on the counter. Or your little sister’s inhaler laid out on your kitchen table with a ribbon around it.”

I thought of Lauren. Of Charlotte being a lovely city. There was a tremor in my fingers.

“And it’s not just the fear,” he went on. “It’s the guilt. They teach you to feel responsible for the things they’re doing through you. So if you stop, it’s not just ‘you’ll get hurt,’ it’s ‘you’re the one hurting everyone by going against us.’ They get inside the part of you that wants to be good and they fuck it all up so being good means going along with it.” He finally looked at me. “I’ve watched people try to leave. My cousin ran. Got two states away. They didn’t even have to go get him. He came back on his own three weeks later because he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. He was sure his sister had died because of him. She hadn’t. Didn’t matter. The fear did the work for free. He never tried again. I knew another guy who—” He stopped. “It doesn’t end well, mostly. That’s the point of letting us see it.”

The birds in my chest had gone quiet. I was just listening now. Some of the pressure had eased out of my head.

“So when Damian says he wasn’t brave enough, that it took him too long, all of that…” Kai shook his head slowly, his hands resting loosely clasped on his knees. “He’s blaming himself for not beating the thing that nobody beats. But he did the thing that almost none of us do. He tried anyway. He tried when he knew what it would cost him, and because he didn’t do it in time, he’ll never forgive himself.”

“But he’s been doing this for ten years. What about all the others?” I said. A graveyard full of women slid into my mind, Damian attending to just one grave.

“Wren was the first one he tried to save. The first one he allowed himself to fall in love with. The first one who had kids. But he mourns them all, Marlowe. He mourns them as nails on his arm. We both have our nails.”

I glanced at the row of friendship bracelets on his tan wrist. “Those bracelets… they don’t mark all the places you nearly drowned, do they?”

“No,” he said quietly. “They don’t. And the ocean is the only place I’ve ever felt safe.”

“I’m sorry, Kai.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the bracelets.

“You don’t have to be sorry. That’s mine to carry. I just want you to know this. There was no door, Marlowe. It was just about how much pain he could hold while he tried to find one. He held more than anyone I’ve ever met. That’s not the story of a coward. I don’t know how to make it plainer than that.”

I still couldn’t speak. The cold thing that had been sitting under my ribs since the aviary was breaking up, and what came in behind it was just as bad. It was shame.

“I believed her,” I whispered. “For a whole day, I—”

“Of course you did. That’s the point. That’s the whole point.” He sat back, almost weary. “You think Octavia would be happy with a simple trade? She wanted this.” He gestured at me. “This wreckage. She was never going to let you walk away with her son in one piece. She didn’t need a ritual for it. She didn’t need candles or blood or a dead bird on your step. She just needed five minutes alone with you and the one true thing he never told you, twisted.”

“A hex,” I said, before I’d thought about it.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding slowly. “Sometimes it’s just the right words at the exact moment you’re too tired to fight them. She found the thing you were already scared of, that you couldn’t trust what you felt, and she handed you a reason to run. And it worked.” He tilted his head. “Is it still working? Right now? Are you breaking up with him?”

Something bright and loud swelled in me, and it sent my pulse through the roof.

“No,” I whispered. And then, because it was true and I needed to say it to someone: “But I’m not just taking your word for it either.”

Kai raised his eyebrows.

“Yesterday I believed a bitch in an aviary. Tonight I’m believing you. I keep handing the whole story to whoever talked to me last.” I was already standing. “There’s exactly one person I need to hear this from.”

And then I was on my bare feet, and I don’t remember crossing the room, only Kai saying something behind me that might have been go and might have been my name, and the door, and the cold of the evening hitting my wet face and the rough sidewalk on my soles, and the street, and the jeep parked across it under the dead streetlight where it had been for a night and a day, and the dark silhouette of him already sitting up behind the glass, already reaching for the handle, because he’d seen me.

I ran.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Damian was already out of the jeep by the time I reached the curb, one hand still on the open door.

“Marlowe”

His voice broke me in half.