I tried to turn toward it, but my body wouldn’t comply.
Her hands were on me, applying pressure to my chest.
Voices yelled things I couldn’t quite catch.
“Stay with me?—”
“Get a medic?—”
“Where’s the?—”
But none of it mattered, because everything was slipping away quickly.
The edges of the world blurred and darkened.And then, something changed.
The noise faded completely.The pain dulled, gone.
Silence settled in, heavy and absolute, stealing my breath away.
32
Tone
The world broke in front of me.
One second Archie was moving—fast, unstoppable, all violence and rage—and the next—he dropped.
His knees hit the tarmac first, his body folding in on itself like something had cut the strings holding him upright.
Red bloomed across his chest—two brutal gunshots driven into places that I knew there was no coming back from.
My breath stopped.
His hand went to his heart, fingers pressing into the spreading stain like he could hold himself together through sheer will alone.Blood soaked through his shirt, darkening, thickening, unstoppable.
And his eyes—they found me.Locked there, even as the world tore itself apart around us.
Everything inside me screamed that this wasn’t real, that this couldn’t be real.That it was just a waking nightmare where someone would flip the switch and everything would be right with the world again.
Move.
The word flickered somewhere in the back of my mind.
Move.
I knew what to do.I knew.
Pressure.Stabilize.Assess.Act.My entire life had been built around moments like this.But my body revolted.
I stood there, frozen in disbelief, rooted to the spot like something had reached inside my chest and locked everything in place.
Archie.He came for me.All this way—through blood and distance and everything that tried to keep us apart—and he still found me.We found each other.And now—now I was losing him even before I had found him.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.Not after we’d come this far.Not after everything we hadn’t even had the chance to be.
We weren’t finished.We were just beginning.And the future was already being torn away from us.
The gunfire slowed.Then stopped.Like someone had pulled the sound out of the air.One final shot cracked clean and sharp, cutting through the silence that followed.
