Page 75 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
The drive out sits badly in me from the moment we leave the apartment.
It isn’t just nerves, and it isn’t just the remains of everything I swallowed earlier still working their way out of my system. It feels deeper than that, like my whole body knows this is the point where whatever line was left between before and after is finally going to disappear, and even with Lucian beside me and the second car following behind us, carrying Elijah and Christian, I can’t get any part of myself to settle.
I keep my hands flat against my thighs because if I let them move, if I let myself fidget or brace or pace the way I want to, I know exactly where my head is going to go.
Back to her.
It always goes back to her.
Not to some vague idea of her, not to the memory of her laugh or the way she fits against me in bed or the sound of her voice when she says my name. It goes back to what I saw. It goes backto the bed. To the cuts torn across her collarbone. To the way she looked too slow inside her own body, like she was there but not fully able to reach herself properly, like whatever that bastard gave her had dragged her under and left just enough of her above the surface to make it worse.
I can still see the terror in her eyes.
That’s the part that won’t move.
That and the cuts.
That and the way she looked helpless in a way Lia never should.
I should have held myself together.
That thought keeps circling back, not because I think I had anything to do with her being taken, but because I know exactly what I became once she was gone. Weak. Useless. Another person in that apartment that needed carrying instead of being useful. Another problem. Another body taking up space while she was still out there.
“Stop punishing yourself long enough to be useful.”
Lucian says it without looking at me. His voice stays level, easy, the same tone he’s used the entire drive, like he already knows exactly where my head has gone and isn’t interested in letting me stay there.
I let out a breath through my nose and keep my eyes on the windscreen.
“That easy?”
“No,” he says. “If it were easy, you wouldn’t have nearly killed yourself in her bathroom.”
That lands exactly where he means it to.
I don’t answer.
He glances at me for a second, then back to the road.
“You don’t get the luxury of collapse again,” he says. “Not while she’s still out there. Whatever shame you want to drown in, whatever disgust you feel toward yourself, whatever grief issitting in your throat, you can have it later. Right now it serves no one.”
I look at him then, because there’s no pity in him when he says it, no softness, no attempt to dress it up as comfort.
“You think I don’t know that?” I ask.
“I think you know it,” he replies. “I don’t think you know what to do with it.”
I go quiet again because that part is true.
The city gives way gradually, the roads emptier out here, the industrial lots wider apart, the night swallowing more of everything between them. The second car stays behind us at a clean distance, never too close, never too far. I don’t need to see Elijah to feel him there. I can feel his rage the way I can feel weather when it’s about to break. It’s been sitting over the apartment for three days now, thick and heavy and impossible to ignore.
“I’m not him,” I say eventually.
Lucian’s mouth shifts slightly, not quite a smile.
“No,” he says. “You aren’t.”
“I can’t do what he does.”
