Page 99 of Break Me Apart
My brother is dead in the snow and they are still using words like appropriate.
“I’m going,” I say, keeping my face neutral enough to prove it’s not a problem. The officer looks me over once, twice, then nods, and that’s the end of the argument.
The ride out is quiet, and the quiet, for me, is never a good thing. I sit opposite the doors with my hands clasped loosely and my eyes on the sky beyond the window. Caiden’s name keeps coming back to me.“There had been concerns. The call was made from their side.”
I don’t let myself think about it properly yet. If I do, I will lose the use of my hands before I need them most. So, I think about Niko as he was the last time I saw him at the flat. Tired. Thinner. Trying. Still trying, which now feels like the cruellest part of it. Cassie dies, and he gets up anyway. He puts Vladimir first, goes back to work, keeps himself straight, and the world answers that effort by shooting him in the snow.
I hold my teeth together hard enough that my jaw aches and my teeth crack.
No one dares to speak to me.
When we reach the site, the cold is worse than back at the base. Trees stand in rows under the darkening sky, their branches heavy with snow that drops in soft clumps whenever the wind moves through. At first glance, there’s nothing to see. Just woods, white ground, and tracks where men have already passed through.
Then my eyes start scanning for what belongs and what doesn’t. Snow pressed down in the wrong places, earth scuffed up where it should be smooth, and a branch broken halfway through, hanging low.
Then my eyes lock onto the one dark patch ahead, half-covered already, not hidden so much as left behind.
Someone says my name behind me, and I ignore him.
My eyes stop on him first, then my brain catches up a few seconds later. Niko is lying on his side near the edge of a shallow ditch, gear still on, weapon not far from his hand, as if he simply stopped moving in the middle of doing something ordinary.
Snow has gathered in the folds of his uniform, and I stop a few feet away because the mind is a stupid thing and still insists, for one second longer, that walking the final distance might change what I am looking at.
My brain gives me the report version one last time.
KIA. Confirmed. Recovery follows.
I take one more step and that version falls apart completely.
The sound that leaves me is... wrong, dragged out of somewhere from the core of me. My knees hit the snow hard, then I’m moving, crawling on my hands and knees fast, then I’m holding him before anyone can stop me.
My hands grip the front of his jacket, my fingers bunching fabric hard enough to tear it.
He’s cold.
Of course, he’s fucking cold.
I press my forehead to his shoulder and for a second my head rejects it with the same vicious certainty it uses for everything else.
This is wrong.
This isn’t how this ends.
Niko doesn’t die.
Niko keeps people alive.
The next book does not have to be chosen today.
Have a relaxed browse throughLokepubwhenever you like.
Niko gets hit and gets back up.
Niko survives because he refuses not to.
I pull back and look at his face. My hand goes to his throat without thinking, fingers pressing for a pulse I already know I won’t find. The lack of it rocks me so hard my vision blurs.
Someone touches my shoulder, and I twist fast and hard, knocking the hand away before I even see who it belongs to. “Ne trogay menya, chyort voz’mi!”Don’t touch me, damn it!I practicallygrowl at him.
