Helpless.
Animal.
“Wake up,” he whispered. “Leena…please.”
He swallowed hard, trying to force control back into a body that no longer recognized command.
“I’m here.”
His voice broke.
“I’m here. I’m sorry.”
Leena did not move.
Her silence answered with finality.
One by one, the brothers fractured in their own quiet ways.
Cole bowed his head over the crying child.
Malakai turned his face away.
Dax’s hand remained locked on Rhen’s shoulder.
No one knew what to do with their bodies.
No one knew where to put the pain.
* * *
Rhen remained on the floor.
Not because he lacked the strength to stand. He possessed strength in obscene quantities.
His body simply no longer understood the purpose of movement.
He sat where Leena had been taken from him, his back against the side of the bed, knees bent, hands open in his lap as though waiting for someone to return their weight.
Her blood dried in dark, cracking patches across his knuckles and palms.
It pulled when he flexed his fingers.
He did not wipe it away.
The thought of washing felt like denial.
Like erasing proof.
Failure was the only word his grief would allow, even when the medic’s stained hands proved there had been nothing more he could have done.
He had lost her.
She had died in his arms, cooling against his chest while he held on as though refusal could rewrite the laws governing human flesh.
That was the part that hollowed him.
The simplicity of it.
