“I thought you were dead,” he said finally. Voice low. Steady, but only just. “You were wrapped in this blood-soaked blanket. Face pale. Eyes shut. I couldn’t tell if you were breathing.”
He paused. “There was so much blood.”
He looked off down the road, like he was still seeing it.
“I put you on my horse and rode like hel,” he said. “Didn’t even know where I was going. Just knew I had to get you somewhere safe.”
There was a pause.
“I begged them to save you.”
That broke something in me. “Was the village still burning?”
He nodded once. “Smoke everywhere,” he said. “But most of the fire was out by then.”
“Do you think anything’s left?” He looked over at me. “The houses? The school?”
Will shook his head. “Maybe a few buildings. Not much else.”
“But not the people.”
He didn’t look at me when he said it. “No. Not the people.”
I hesitated. The question burned in my chest.
“Your mother… did she suffer?”
His whole body locked up.
“I don’t want to—”
I winced. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I just—” My voice cracked. “I keep thinking maybe if you’d taken her instead of me—”
He turned to me so fast it startled me.
“If I had, I’d have lost youboth.”
“But what if there was a way—”
”There wasn’t.” His voice cracked straight through the middle.
“You should’ve saved her,” I said. “Not me.”
He turned, fists clenched, eyes glassy with everything he was trying not to feel.
“They cut her in half, Kera,” he snapped. The words ripped out of him, loud and brutal. “She was already gone.”
He didn’t ever look at me when he said the next part.
“There was no one left. Just you.”
That’s what he said.Justyou. And it hit harder than I thought it would. Because in that moment, I realized something. Finding me hadn’t been a relief. It hadn’t been a victory. He had just found his mother’s body in the streets. And then he’d gone looking, hoping, maybe, to find someone, anyone, still alive. And all he’d found… was me.
He didn’t answer at first. Just stood there, fists clenched at his sides, staring out over the valley like he was searching for something—anything—to make sense of it all.
Then, quiet. Shaking.
“Why? Why would anyone do that?”
