Page 181 of Ghost Ribbon

Something inside my chest folded in on itself.

I needed Marco to open his eyes. I needed to see the colour of them again. I needed to know whether that love would still be there once he found out the truth, even though… I didn’t want to tell him. The thought of watching his face change when he understood what I had done made my hands go cold. I wondered if Rei would be the one to put the knife in.

“I won’t tell him.” His words came as if he had reached into my skull and pulled the fear out by its roots.

He met my eyes without flinching. “The thing is… he won’t hate you. But he will hate himself. He’s so kind. The thought that he took a person’s heart - someone who could have been innocent - will destroy him. He will hate himself.”

A fine tremor started in my fingers and travelled up my arms. Marco already carried too much self-loathing. If he ever learned that one hundred and forty-seven lives had been erased so his could continue, he would look at his own chest and see a graveyard.

A thick lump rose in my throat. I couldn’t swallow it down.

Rei’s voice softened further. He sighed again. “I won’t tell him,” he repeated.

And I wasn’t sure I should either.

***

I leaned over him and pressed my lips to his forehead.

They had already begun preparing him for the surgery. I stayed there longer than I should have, forehead against his, trying to pour every unbroken part of myself into him before they took him away.

I was scared. I was so fucking scared.

I cupped the side of his face with shaking fingers and brought my mouth close to his ear so the words would belong only to him.

“Be strong for me, little star,” I whispered. “I need you to come back to me. I need these beautiful eyes to open again and look at me the way they always have. Please… fight your way back. I don’t know how to exist in a world that doesn’t have you in it.”

My throat closed. I kissed his cheek, then the corner of his mouth. I lowered my face into the curve of his neck and breathed him in one last time. I tried to lock it inside my lungs forever, as if storing it carefully enough might keep him tethered to me.

Hands appeared at the sides of the bed. I stepped back only when I had no choice.

I watched the bed roll down the corridor, watched the doors swing shut.

The hours that followed were the hardest of my life.

I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t speak. I walked the same stretch of hallway until the floor blurred beneath my feet, counting ceiling tiles and scuff marks and the exact number of steps it took to reach the double doors and turn around again. Every time those doors opened my heart stopped cold.

Chapter 45 - Marco

It was dark.

An ocean of black that pressed against my eyelids and filled the hollows of my bones.

I believed the darkness would keep me.

I believed I would drift here forever, a ghost suspended between one breath and the next, never again touching warmth.

Then light shattered the black.

It came without warning - flooding every corner of the void until the dark itself seemed to recoil. And in the heart of that radiance a smile bloomed, the same smile I would have known among a million others.

My eyes opened.

The world above me swam, blurred and overbright. A face hovered close - haloed by harsh hospital light - yet I knew it in the marrow of me.

Alexei.

His voice broke open, calling for doctors. Noise flooded in after it - footsteps, overlapping voices, the mechanical pulse of machines answering in beeps. Everything felt distant and too near at once, as if I floated just beneath the surface of a restless sea while the living world moved above me.