CASSIAN

The exact second Julian’s body hit the floorboards, with the dark blood rushing out from his neck, something inside my head snapped.

It wasn’t a choice I made. It wasn’t a sudden wave of fury, or a heavy weight of grief, or even the basic instinct to keep my own heart beating.

The entire world just went completely silent.

The room turned blindingly white, not like a flash of physical light, but as if my brain had simply shut off every single sight and sound that didn’t matter right that second.

My body started moving before the thinking part of my mind could even form a single word.

The guards who were pinning my arms back thought they were holding a regular man, a human being who could feel pain or worry about a blade. .

What they were holding now was a wild animal, a desperate creature that had nothing left to lose. They were going to figure that out in about two seconds.

I slammed my right elbow backward with everything I had in my shoulder. It hit the first man dead in the center of his throat, crushing the bone with a sickening crunch.

He choked, his fingers instantly letting go of my jacket as he stumbled back, and before he could even touch the concrete, I snatched the heavy black pistol straight out from the holster at his hip.

After that, it wasn’t a fight. A fight means there are two sides, both of them trying to survive, both of them trading blows to see who comes out on top.

This wasn’t that. This was just a man moving through a bright room with the terrifying focus of someone who has stopped caring whether he lives until midnight.

I didn’t care about my skin, I didn’t care about the bullets, and I didn’t care about myself.

Emilio started firing wild shots from the center of the floor, the loud bangs shaking the rafters, but I grabbed the next guard by his collar and pulled him right into the line of fire.

The man’s chest absorbed the heavy thuds of the bullets, his body going completely limp in my hands, but I was already pushing past him, already clearing the distance between us.

The sounds in the warehouse didn’t feel like sounds anymore. They were just dull vibrations against my teeth. I couldn’t hear my own breathing, I couldn’t feel the air in my lungs, and I didn’t feel the weight of the gun kicking back in my palm as I pulled the trigger again and again.

The men fell down around me like heavy sacks of grain, one by the table, another by the crates, and then the rest of them hitting the dirt in a messy heap.

Emilio’s face completely twisted. The smugness vanished under his white bandages, and in that split second, he finally understood what he had actually created in this room.

I wasn’t a rival coming to settle a score or a soldier looking for revenge. I was a force that had stopped being interested in anything other than tearing through every single thing in front of it.

The terror in his eyes was absolute. It was pure, freezing fear, and it was the first honest expression he had shown me since I walked through the door.

"Get him!" Emilio shrieked, his voice cracking into a high scream as he stumbled backward. He grabbed his father’s arm, frantically shoving the old man toward the open exit, trying to throw the last two remaining guards at me like blockades to buy himself five more seconds of life.

Don Aldo was already halfway out the door, his boots slipping on the wet gravel outside.

Emilio was pulling him by his sleeve, but the old Don was still staring back into the bright warehouse, his mouth open in complete confusion.

He was a powerful man who had ruled the city for forty years, and he was encountering something that his money and his names couldn’t control. He didn’t know how to look at a man who didn’t care about dying.

I crossed the concrete in three strides, the heavy pistol coming up in my right hand. I didn’t aim at Emilio. I aimed straight at the old man who had looked at his watch while Julian was tied to that wooden chair.

The bullet took Don Aldo right in the side of his neck. I didn’t mean for it to happen that way; it wasn’t some poetic choice to match what they had done to Julian. It was just where the barrel was pointing when my finger squeezed the metal.

The old man went down like a felled tree. Emilio’s hands caught him by the shoulders, his boots skidding through the mud as he tried to bear the weight, but he couldn’t do it.

The weight of a dying father in your arms is a heavy, terrible thing, much heavier than he ever expected it to be.

Emilio looked up at me over the bleeding body, his face completely pale beneath the white linen.

The arrogance was entirely gone, leaving nothing but a twenty-year-old boy who had just watched his father die on the dirt, looking at the man who did it and realizing that there were horrors in this world he hadn’t even dreamed of before tonight.

He dropped the body and ran into the dark. I fired one last shot after him, the bullet splintering the wooden doorframe into white teeth, but he scrambled through the gap and disappeared into the salt marshes.

I didn’t follow him. I didn’t care about the rest of the night. I was already turning around, my knees hitting the hard concrete before my mind could even tell me to stop, crawling frantically across the floor toward the center of the room.

Julian was completely still. The dark red blood had spread out in a wide, terrible circle around his shoulders, the white tile holding every single drop of it without letting it sink in.

I slammed my hands down against his neck, my palms pressing hard into the torn skin, trying to block the wound. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

My fingers were slippery with it, the heat of his life leaking out through the gaps in my knuckles, and I kept pressing down with everything I had, trying to do what human hands simply cannot do when the throat is ruined.

"Julian," I whispered, my voice shaking so hard the name was barely a word. "Hey. Look at me, Julian. I’m right here. I’m right here with you."

His right eye was still open. It was moving slowly, rolling back from the white glare of the lamps until it found my face. He looked straight at me, and the look in his eye wasn’t pain anymore.

The pain had happened earlier, during those four long days in the dark. This was something else entirely. It was the expression of a person whose worst, most terrifying fear had just been proven wrong.

"I came back," I sobbed, saying it over and over because he needed to hear the words before the dark took him.

"I came back for you. I’m so sorry, Julian. I’m so incredibly sorry. I never should have left the house. I never should have walked away from that door. Julian, please. Stay with me. You have to stay with me. Just keep your eye on me."

I kept my palms clamped against his skin, but the red kept coming, pumping out between my thumbs with an impossible, stubborn insistence, as if his body already understood that it was already over.

Julian’s right hand moved. It was a tiny, fluttering gesture, his fingers dragging through the dust until they touched my bare wrist.

He didn’t have the strength to grip me; he just left his hand there, his fingertips resting right against my pulse point, as if he were checking to see if I was a real person or just another cruel trick his mind was playing on him before the end.

I snatched his hand up, wrapping both of my bloody palms around his cold fingers, crushing them against my chest.

"Don’t do this," I begged, the tears finally breaking through and blurring my sight until the whole room was just a smear of white and red.

"Don’t leave me here. Please, Julian. Please."

His mouth moved just a fraction. There was no sound coming out of his split lips now, not even a whisper, but I read the shape of the words anyway. I knew the shape of his mouth by heart; I had spent years watching him speak across dark rooms and crowded kitchens.

It’s okay.

"It is not okay!" I screamed, my voice completely shattering in the empty warehouse. "It’s not okay! You don’t get to say that! You don’t get to leave me with this! Julian! Julian!"

The faint pressure of his fingers against my wrist suddenly lessened. It wasn’t the way a hand relaxes when it falls asleep; it was that specific, terrible letting go that means the life has left the meat. I felt the exact second it changed.

I didn’t let go of him. I reached down and gathered his shoulders, pulling his top half off the floor until he was pressed hard against my chest.

I kept one hand smashed against his neck, the wound didn’t need pressing anymore, but I couldn’t stop and I dropped my forehead down against his, our skin sticking together in the heat.

A violent, uncontrollable shaking started deep in the center of my ribs and rushed outward into my arms. I had never shaken in front of a gun or a knife in my entire life, but I was trembling so hard now that my teeth clicked together in the quiet.

I kept talking because I knew that if I stopped speaking, the reality would settle in, and if the reality settled in, I would never get up off this floor.

"We were going to open that restaurant," I gasped out, my throat raw and ruined from the crying.

"We had the whole thing worked out. You were going to be front of house, remember? You were so stubborn about it. You had the menus written down on those little scraps of paper."

I drew in a ragged, choking breath, his blood staining the front of my shirt.

"You would have been terrible at it, Julian. You would have been so bad with the customers. You would have argued with every single person who sent a dish back. But you would have loved it so much."