“Cas? Cas! Talk to me. Come on, Cas. Please,” I whisper, my hands trembling as I try to lift the rubble.
I shouldn’t be strong enough to move the concrete alone, but the sheer desperation of my adrenaline fuels me. Before I can really register what I’m doing, I’m pulling the last piece of debris away.
“Cas? Cassandra, don’t you dare. Come on,” I whimper as I search for a pulse.
There. Finally. Relief floods through me as I feel life flickering through her veins. She’s breathing, she’s alive.
A sob escapes my chest.
“Cassandra,” I whisper again, louder this time, my hands gently cradling her head.
Her eyelids flicker, and after a moment, she groans, her hand weakly grasping mine.
“Mia…” she murmurs, her voice hoarse. “What…what happened?”
I shake my head, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “A bomb or something. But you’re alive. Thank God you’re alive.”
Cassandra’s hand weakly grips mine. “Where…where’s Rocco? Where’s Leon?”
My heart skips a beat, panic rising in my chest once more. I swallow hard, trying to steady my breath. “I don’t know. We need to find them.”
I look around the room, trying to pierce through the dusty smog that has engulfed the space. There are voices and signs of life, but they’re indistinguishable through the ringing in my ears.
“Can you stand?” I ask Cassandra, helping her to sit up as I try to keep the panic from overtaking me.
She nods, though she looks dazed, her face pale and bruised. “I think so.”
“Stay close,” I tell her, my voice shaking. “We’ll find them. We’ll find everyone.”
We move together, carefully stepping through the rubble, clinging to each other like a lifeline. My heart pounds in my chest, my eyes scanning the wreckage for any sign of Leon.
“Leon!” I call again, but my voice feels small in the wreckage, swallowed by the smoke and dust.
Cassandra’s hand tightens around mine as if to comfort me. I don’t think anything of it until I realize she’s stopped moving entirely.
“Cas, come on. We need to?—”
My voice trails off the second I realize what she’s staring at. My eyes open wide and flood with unshed tears.
“No.”
There, buried under the rubble only a few feet away, is an arm. It’s the only appendage not crushed by the giant slab of the ceiling.
And I know who it is immediately.
I’ve known that hand my whole life. The hand that held mine as a child, the hand that steadied my gun at the shooting range. The hand that wrapped around my arm the day I was to be married.
“No.”
Everything crumbles apart.
I’d rather take a knife to the gut. I’d rather the ceiling had crushed me instead.
I immediately mentally apologize to my children. Everything is different now, but that doesn’t stop my heart from breaking into thousands of pieces.
“Daddy, no.”
It wasn’t fair. I hadn’t forgiven him yet. We were supposed to have years to rebuild, years to figure out how to trust each other again.
