CASSIAN

The tears were pouring down my nose, dripping onto his pale cheeks. "I have the money, Julian. I have the keys to the building in the safe. We were almost out of the city. We were so close to the edge of it. Julian, please. I’m so sorry. I should have been there when they kicked the door in. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry."

Julian’s face was perfectly still against mine. The small green jade pendant he always wore hung loose against his collarbone, covered in the same dark red that was now on my hands, my clothes, and my face. I didn’t notice it. I didn’t care about the mess.

I began to rub his fingers between my palms, frantically chafing his skin back and forth to bring the warmth back into them. It was the completely irrational, frantic act of a man whose mind has completely fractured, a man whose brain refuses to accept what his hands have known for five minutes.

I stayed there on my knees for a very long time. I sat in the middle of the red puddle, surrounded by the silence of the dead men and the high, white glare of the lamps, and nothing else in the world mattered anymore. Not the family, not the city, not myself. Nothing.

The first sound that came from the outside world was a siren. It was a distant, high-pitched wail, drifting in from the highway over the salt marshes, but it sounded thin, as if it were happening on the other side of a thick pane of glass. I barely heard it.

But then, another sound started up.

It wasn’t coming from the yard outside the warehouse. It was coming from somewhere underneath the concrete floor, or somewhere high above the rafters, a frantic, metallic noise of clicking buttons and rushing footsteps that didn’t belong in this empty building.

There were voices overlapping each other, loud and professional, but they had the wrong acoustics for this city. They sounded hollow, trapped inside a tiny box.

"We’re losing him!" a voice shouted. It was a man’s voice, but it wasn’t Emilio or Don Aldo. "Get the line back in! His blood pressure is dropping too fast!"

I stayed on my knees, my hands still wrapped around Julian’s cold fingers, and looked up at the ceiling.

The corrugated steel was beginning to flicker, the white light of the construction lamps stuttering like a film strip coming off its reel.

Another voice cut through the noise. This one was closer, right next to my ear, carrying a deep, terrifying desperation that had no name in this version of my life.

It was a familiar voice, a sound I knew the way a man knows the shape of his own hands, but I couldn’t place it among the warehouses or the docks.

"Come on," the voice sobbed, right against my cheek. "Please, Cassian. Come on. Don’t do this."

The room gave a violent shudder. The edges of the concrete walls were dissolving into gray mist, and for a split second, the dark red blood on the floorboards turned a strange, clear fluid color before snapping back to red.

The walls around me were wrong; they were too clean, too white.

Julian was still in my arms, his head heavy against my shoulder, but then... he wasn’t. He didn’t disappear, but he became less solid, like an old photograph dropped into a bucket of water, the image was still there, but the ink was starting to run and move at the edges.

"Cassian!" the voice screamed again. It sounded like someone who had been calling my name for hours, someone who was running out of breath and strength but refused to stop shouting into the dark.

I knew that voice. I knew it from a place far away from the Vincenti family or the coast road. I knew it the way you remember a song you heard before you were old enough to understand the words.

"Julian?" I called out into the flickering room, but the name didn’t bring him back. The figure in my arms was turning to smoke.

"I’m here," the voice from the other side answered, breaking through the white glare. "I’m right here with you. Please wake up, Cassian. Please."

The sirens were getting louder now, but they were ringing in two different places at the exact same time. The police cars were pulling into the gravel lot outside the industrial building, and at the same moment, a high, mechanical screaming was going off in a room I couldn’t see yet.

The warehouse doors were kicked open with a massive crash. Men with long rifles and black helmets poured through the gap, their boots loud against the gravel, their shouts layering over those other, urgent medical voices until the air was nothing but noise.

"Drop the weapon! Stay on the ground!"

I didn’t move from the floor. I didn’t look at the red laser dots dancing across my chest, and I didn’t register the guns as a threat worth responding to. They could pull the triggers if they wanted; it didn’t change the fact that my hands were empty.

A pair of heavy hands grabbed me by the shoulders from behind, yanked me backward, and dragged me away from the center of the floor.

My fingers stayed closed, stiff and hooked, still trying to hold onto the shape of Julian’s hand even after they had pulled my body a yard away from him.

The dream was being ripped away from me, or I was being ripped away from the dream, and I couldn’t tell which side was the real one anymore.

Then came a different pair of hands... cold, rubbery gloves pressing against my neck, a bright, sterile light burning straight through my eyelids, and the sharp, chemical smell of bleach and plastic that had absolutely no place in that old industrial lot.

"He’s coming back!" a voice yelled directly above my head. "The heart rate is stabilizing! Mr. Wolfe, can you hear me? Look at the light!"

And underneath all the clatter of the metal poles and the screaming monitors, there was that one single voice again.

It wasn’t official, it wasn’t medical, it was just... there, the same way it had been every single day while I was asleep.

"I’m here," Noah whispered, his hand finding mine in the white glare. "I’m still here, Cassian."

I was in the blood on the tile, and I was in the white room with the plastic tubing, both things happening at the exact same time until the border between them completely vanished. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Julian’s face was the very last thing to go... his one open eye finding mine across the distance one final time before the entire universe went stark white.

What the police found when they broke through the metal doors of the lot wasn’t what they had expected to see after a report of shots fired in the marshes.

They had expected to find a typical gangland cleanup, a couple of runners loading crates into the back of a van.

Instead, they found a slaughterhouse.

And right in the middle of the dead men, sitting in a massive pool of red that wasn’t his own, was a single man on his knees.

He was holding the hand of a boy who was far past hearing anything he had to say, his fingers locked so tightly around the cold wrist that they had to wrench them apart by force.

I didn’t resist them when they pulled me up. I didn’t say a word, I didn’t look at the badges, and I wasn’t present in any way that made sense to the officers who were shouting at me.

My eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead at the blank wall, but I wasn’t seeing the corrugated iron anymore.

The officers were yelling commands, their voices high and nervous because of the bodies on the concrete, but the words didn’t translate to anything in my head. They were just empty noise.

An officer stepped into my space, grabbed my arms, and pulled them behind my back. My fingers stayed curled into that hollow, empty fist... the exact shape of holding something that wasn’t there anymore.

They stood me up on my feet, and my legs moved mechanically, walking across the floor because someone was pushing my shoulder blades.

The rest of me was entirely somewhere else. I was still sitting on the bench by the coast road; I was still inside the flat with the keys in my pocket; I was still standing on that gravel roof at twenty-three years old, watching Julian blow out the candles on a birthday cake he had pretended was his own idea just to see me smile.

The cold metal of the handcuffs clicked around my wrists. I didn’t help them, and I didn’t fight the metal; I was just a physical shell being steered through the room by men who were terrified of what I had done, men who didn’t understand that they didn’t need to be afraid of me anymore. Not tonight. Not ever again.

One of the younger officers looked at my face as we reached the exit, and he looked away immediately, unable to keep his eyes on my skin.

It wasn’t because my face was frightening or because I looked dangerous; it was because there was nothing left behind my eyes at all. It was just the face of a man who had been completely and quietly destroyed from the inside out.

The last thing I saw before they shoved my head down into the back seat of the transport car was Julian lying on the white tile. He was exactly where I had left him, completely still, the little green jade pendant catching the last of the construction light.

I closed my eyes. The heavy metal door slammed shut, cutting off the view, and the sirens outside started up their long, miserable wail as the car began to move.

The dream stopped there. Or it didn’t stop, but the dark took it back.

And somewhere above the dirt, miles away from the marshes, the machines kept clicking, the bright lights kept burning, and the smell of the bleach waited for me to open my eyes.