Page 98 of A Pretty Kind of Violence
“No, they won’t! Okay?” His voice cracks on it. Ian’s voice never cracks. “They fucking won’t.”
I stop pulling at the door. Look at him through eyes so full of tears I can barely see.
His jaw is working. His knuckles are white on the wheel. And I realize, in the specific, terrible way you realize things when everything has been stripped down to what’s real, that Ian is holding himself together by the same thread I am.
“She won’t kill him,” he says. Softer. Like he’s saying it for both of us.
“How can you be so sure?”
A long pause. The road winds down through the dark. “Because he’s the best weapon she’s got.”
The word lands like a punch to the chest. Weapon. Not a person. Not the man who pressed his forehead to mine and whispered words he said he wasn’t capable of.
“He’s not a weapon,” I spit out.
“Yeah, Crazy.” He glances at me. “He is.”
We drive. Away from the house, away from the murderous calculus behind us, down the mountain road slick with black ice. My hands tremble somewhere between rage and fear and the stupid, useless helplessness of being in this fucking car and not with him.
I swipe angrily at the tears on my face. “Will she hurt him?”
Ian keeps his eyes fixed on the road, hands clenched so tightly around the steering wheel that the tendons in his forearms stand out like cables under strain.
His silence is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. Louder than the window shattering. Louder than the gunshots echoing down the hallway. Louder than my own screaming.
Something inside me breaks.
Not clean. Not a sharp, merciful snap. It’s the slow, grinding, tectonic kind of breaking—the kind that happens so deep you don’t see the cracks on the surface, but you feel the fault lines shifting, rearranging everything you thought was solid.
I lean back into the seat, the mountain trees blurring past in streaks of green and white. Tears slide silently down my face, hot and endless.
Everything hurts. My chest feels hollowed out, scraped raw, and I don’t know where in my body this much pain is supposed tofit. But somehow it does. Because I have no idea what’s going to happen to him. What fresh hell he’s going to have to crawl through.
But the worst part, the thought that keeps twisting like a knife, is wondering if I’ll ever see him again.
And if I do…what monster will they have carved him back into?
Reth and Sophia’s story isn’t over.
The obsession deepens. The mask slips further.
And it only gets darker.
