Page 225 of Dante
I want to open my eyes. Want to grab his hand and demand to know where he's going. What he's doing. Why he sounds like he's saying goodbye.
But I can't move.
If I open my eyes now, he'll know I was awake. He'll know I heard whatever he just said. And something tells me he doesn't want me to know.
His lips linger on my skin for another heartbeat.
Then he pulls away.
I hear him cross the room. Hear the door open. Hear it close behind him with a soft click.
Silence.
I open my eyes.
What the hell was that?
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Marina
Ascream tears through the silence.
Not a normal scream. Not the startled yelp of a nightmare or the sharp cry of someone who's stubbed their toe in the dark. This is something else entirely. It reaches into my chest and squeezes until I can't breathe.
I'm on my feet before my eyes fully open, my body moving on instinct while my brain scrambles to catch up. The hallway outside our bedroom stretches ahead of me, dark except for the thin strip of light spilling from under a door at the far end.
The scream comes again. Longer this time. The kind of sound a person makes when something inside them has been ripped out by the roots.
Sophia.
My bare feet slap against the hardwood as I run. The floor is cold. My heart hammers against my ribs so hard I can feel it in my throat, in my temples, behind my eyes. Every step feels too slow. The hallway stretches forever, the walls closing in around me, and all I can think is no, no, no, please no — aprayer directed at nobody, at everybody, at whatever force in the universe decides to make someone react this way.
I round the corner. Sophia's bedroom door is open, light pouring into the hallway like a wound.
I stop in the doorway.
Nico stands in the center of the room with his arms locked around Sophia from behind. She thrashes against him — fists swinging, elbows driving backward, her whole body twisting and bucking like a trapped animal.
"You're lying!" The words rip from her throat, shredded and barely recognizable. "You're LYING! Lorenzo! LORENZO!"
"Sophia." Nico's voice is strained in a way I've never heard from him. "Sophia, stop. Please. You're going to hurt yourself."
She doesn't stop. She drives her elbow into his ribs and he grunts but doesn't release her. Her fists beat against his forearms, his chest, anywhere she can reach. The sounds coming out of her aren't words anymore — they're something older than language, something that lives in the part of us that existed before we learned to speak.
I've seen scenes like this before. And they all had to do with death.
I work with foster children who've lost parents, siblings, entire families. I've held teenagers who sobbed until they couldn't breathe, rocked toddlers who screamed for mothers who were never coming back.
I step into the room. My legs feel disconnected from my body, like I'm watching myself move from somewhere far away.
"What happened?" The words come out too quiet. Like I'm asking about the weather instead of the reason my best friend is clawing at a man twice her size and screaming her husband's name. "Sophia, what happened?"
She turns her head toward me. The movement is sharp, violent, like a cornered animal assessing a new threat. Her faceis destroyed. Eyes swollen and red, cheeks streaked with tears and snot, her mouth twisted into a shape that doesn't look like it belongs on a human face.
"He's dead." Her voice drops to something worse than screaming. Flat. Empty. A husk of sound with all the life burned out of it. "Lorenzo is dead."
The floor tilts beneath me.
