Chapter 495: The still after the storm pt 2

Aria

It wasn’t a conscious thought, more like a door swinging open on its own. The image of her on the floor, the blood spreading dark and wide beneath her, her hand still reaching. The way she looked at me. The way she said my name in those last few seconds.

The way she’d been quietly dismantling my life for over a decade and I’d called her my person.

My chest cracked open all over again.

Because even with everything, even knowing what she did, knowing every single thing she took from me and every lie she told and every time she smiled at me while hating me, I had loved her.

Genuinely, completely loved her. And that kind of love doesn’t just turn off because you find out it wasn’t returned the way you thought. It just sits there and hurts.

I cried harder without meaning to.

Kael held me tighter without saying a word, like he somehow knew this wave was different from the last one.

I tried to muffle the sounds in his neck, tried to keep my breathing quiet. Olivia was still on the couch across the room, and I didn’t want to wake her.

I could see her from the corner of my eye even now, curled up in a way that looked deeply uncomfortable, her shoes still on, clearly refusing to leave even in sleep.

So I stayed quiet and I fell apart in Kael’s arms instead, and he let me, and it helped more than I knew how to say.

It was Olivia’s voice that pulled me back.

Soft. Uncertain. Like she wasn’t sure she was really seeing what she was seeing.

"Aria?"

I pulled back from Kael’s neck, wiping my face quickly with the back of my hand, and found her sitting up on the couch. Her hair was everywhere.

Her eyes were red and swollen in the way eyes get when someone has cried themselves into a kind of exhausted stillness. She was looking at me like she was scared to blink in case I disappeared.

I laughed a little. I couldn’t help it. She looked so completely wrecked.

"Yeah," I said. "It’s me."

Something went out of her face.

And then she was across the room and her arms were around me and she was crying before she even reached the bed, and I started crying all over again too because what else was I supposed to do.

"I thought you were going to die," she sobbed into my shoulder. "Aria, I thought, they wouldn’t tell me anything for so long and I kept thinking—"

"I’m here," I said. "I’m right here."

"I was so scared." Her arms tightened. "I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry for everything, for all of it, I’m so sorry, I should have been—"

"Olivia." I pulled back enough to look at her. Her face was a complete disaster and somehow still the most comforting thing I’d ever seen. "We’re okay. That’s what matters right now. Okay?"

She nodded, still crying.

I laughed again, and she laughed too, and it was exactly as messy and tearful and relieved as it should have been.

Kael quietly excused himself at some point to give us space, which was one of those small things he did that most people probably didn’t notice about him but that I had started realizing without meaning to.

By the time evening came around, I was feeling more like myself. Sore and tired and not quite ready to run a marathon, but human again.

Kael had refused to let the doctors talk about discharging me until he was satisfied everything was stable, which the doctors seemed to find very exhausting, but that was his problem, not mine.

I was sitting up in bed with Caleb on my lap when he appeared, which was frankly the best thing that had happened to me since regaining consciousness.

He had apparently been told I was sick, which he took very seriously and was now telling me about every single thing I had missed in enormous detail, including but not limited to a disagreement he had with a boy at school, the new show he was watching, and the fact that someone had given him a chocolate bar with peanuts in it which he did not ask for and considered a personal insult.

I laughed more in those twenty minutes than I had in days.

The door opened and Ash walked in like she owned the hospital.

She stopped when she saw me. Looked at me for a second.

"You look better," she said.

"I feel better."

She crossed the room and hugged me, carefully because of Caleb who was still very much present and deeply uninterested in being moved, and when she pulled back her eyes were a little brighter than usual but she would absolutely deny that if asked.

"I cannot believe," she said, sitting herself down in the chair Kael had vacated, "that we are sitting here having a normal conversation. You had a bomb on you two days ago."

"Ash."

"A literal explosive device strapped to your body."

"I know what a bomb is, thank you—"

"And here you are." She gestured at me. "With your beautiful face and your IV and your child."

"It’s incredibly traumatizing," I agreed.

"It really is." But she was smiling, and so was I, and somehow that felt like exactly the right way to talk about it. Not around it, not through tears, just that it happened, and we’re still here, and isn’t that something.

She told me everything then. How Kael had operated during the search, the kind of cold, ruthless precision that had apparently made even the FBI agents around him uncomfortable.

She described it the way you describe something slightly terrifying that you’re also deeply impressed by, which honestly sounded about right.

I didn’t say anything. I just sat there feeling warmth crawl up the back of my neck.

That was mine. That impossible, terrifying man was mine.

The door opened again, just barely. A crack at first, like whoever was on the other side hadn’t quite committed to coming in yet.

Ash looked over her shoulder. "I was wondering when you’d show your face."

The door swung open the rest of the way and Sylas stepped in.