The word detonates in my skull, relentless and brutal, stripping everything. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t stop. My lungs fight for air, but nothing moves right. My thoughts scatter like broken glass.
Seth is gone?
Knox’s hand clamps around my arm before I can get a full breath. I don’t even register the pain, just the rush of panic swallowing me whole. A sound escapes my mouth, wrecked and desperate.
No. No. No.
This can’t be happening. He can’t be gone. Seth can’t be—
Knox yanks me forward. My body folds, overtaken by grief so violent it shatters my control. Sobs tear out of me in waves.
“Move,” Knox snaps, dragging me when I can’t keep up.
Tears blur everything. My head spins. The corpse Elliot left on the grass lies behind us. But all I can see is Seth bleeding, lifeless.
“No—no—no—” I choke on the words as they break apart in my mouth. They aren’t even words anymore, just sound.
Behind me, Sophie exhales sharply. “Pathetic.”
Asher lets out a quiet laugh.
My legs stop working entirely. Knox doesn’t pause. He just yanks harder, my feet scraping against the ground. My wrist throbs from how hard he grips me, but I barely notice. All I can feel is the nothingness growing inside me, swallowing everything in its path.
He’s not dead.
He can’t be.
The sobs rip out of me louder now.
Sophie’s footsteps accelerate. Then—
CRACK.
Her hand slams across my face, snapping my head sideways with enough force to blur my vision.
“Enough,” she barks. “Get up!”
I drop again, chest heaving, body trembling from the inside out.
My vision swims, but the words don’t stop screaming in my head.
He’s gone.
Seth is gone.
Knox drags me up again, this time managing to get me mostly upright. My legs barely support me, my body a shaking wreck. I can’t stop crying. I can’t ground myself. I am outside of it now, half-watching, half-dissolving.
He wouldn’t leave me. He wouldn’t.
But the voices keep replaying it, until everything inside me shorts out. The numbness sets in like ice beneath my skin.
My world has been reduced to a single word.
Dead.
Knox hauls me across the yard toward the house, Asher walking behind like he is herding something beneath him. Sophie brings up the rear, her face bored, like none of it touches her at all.
Inside, the Manor is silent and freezing. The lights in the hallway flicker overhead. Knox drags me down a narrow passage and through a side door I haven’t noticed before. The room inside is bare. Concrete floors, a drain in the center. No furniture. No windows. A space built for pain.
