Page 202 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
No chance.
No paramedic light.
No body bag still waiting somewhere in the future.
Just rot. Just display. Just a corpse dragged into my line of sight like a bill come due.
The sight tears something open deep in my chest and drags me backward through years so violently my skull seems to ring with it. Every night spent listening for her. Every locked door. Every limp shape on stained bedding. Every lesson learned too young about the difference between sleeping, nodding off, overdosing, dying. Every time I stood perfectly still in a room full of cheap perfume and cigarettes and strange men because stillness was the only thing that kept attention moving past me.
All of it comes back at once.
Not in fragments.
Not in memories.
In the body.
My body remembers before I can think. It remembers counting breaths through doors. It remembers the weight of dread in silence. It remembers the private calculus of a child trying to decide whether to wake a mother or let her sleep because either choice might end badly. It remembers seeing her sprawled in awful positions and praying the angle of a wrist or the slackness of a jaw did not mean what it sometimes meant. It remembers living beside death so often that terror became routine, then became shame for how routine it felt.
Now she is here in front of me, dragged back from the grave not as a woman, not even as a mother, but as a message.
That is what finally breaks whatever balance I had left. Not simply that she is dead. Not simply that he found her, moved her, brought her here. The real cruelty is in the staging. In the fact that he understood exactly what shape would hurt most. He did not show me a body. He recreated a whole childhood in a single motion, then placed the rotting proof of its ending under fluorescent light and waited for me to look.
CHAPTER 42
Octavia
Her chest folds in on itself so hard it feels as though the memory alone might crack bone.
For one sick, suspended moment, the room becomes nothing but noise without shape, ragged breathing, wet choking, the faint hum of the motel lamp, the rustle of cheap fabric, the blood-pulse roar in my ears. No way to tell whether the broken sound clawing through the air belongs to me or to Silas. No way to separate grief from terror once both have been dragged into the same narrow room and made to look at each other.
Then Silas’s voice rips through it.
“I will kill you, fucker!”
The words don’t land like a threat. They detonate. Raw, ugly, alive with the kind of fury that strips a person down to whatever existed in them before civility was taught. The walls seem to catch the force of it, hold it for half a breath, then throw it back.
The Handler turns toward him with the lazy amusement of a man watching something small bare its teeth.
“Will you?”
He says it almost fondly, like he is indulging a child who picked up a toy weapon and decided to pretend. That tone issomehow worse than laughter. Worse than rage. It carries the quiet certainty of someone who believes the ending already belongs to him.
Then his mouth curls.
“That little coke-head Anderson said you’d say something like that.”
Kadin.
The name arrives late, delayed by everything else the room has already shoved into me. It doesn’t strike cleanly. It slides in among the rest of the damage, one more violation in a room built entirely from them. Not some grand betrayal shaped by desperation or love or even hate. Something meaner because it is smaller. Cheaper. More ordinary. Two lives handed over for the price of a fresh line, for the brief bright relief of powder in the bloodstream. Silas. Me. Traded for a high that probably burned out before the night was over.
Nothing in the world has ever felt quite this ugly.
Silas looks like he might tear himself apart just to reach him. Every muscle in his arms stands out against the tape. The chair groans again beneath him. Blood keeps spreading at his side. Breath keeps sawing through him. None of it slows the way he looks at the Handler. If anything, pain seems only to sharpen him, to carve him into something even more dangerous.
The Handler steps toward me.
Panic doesn’t even have room to fully form before he crouches, takes the knife, and slides the edge under the tape around my wrists. For one blindingly foolish second, the cut feels like opening. Like release. Like maybe the world has tilted wrong enough that something merciful slipped in by accident.
