Page 25 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Cas stares at me for a long moment, then shakes his head.

“Yeah. Enough about that snitching shit.” His tone shifts, becoming more businesslike. “We need to find out where Toren is and if Masen and Steven are dead. If they aren't, we prepare for war and take everything from them while they're in the hospital.”

He meets my eyes, and I see the cold determination I know so well.

“Then we kill them all, brother.”

The words should satisfy me. Should fill the emptiness with purpose and direction.

But all I can think about is the way Toren looked at me when she said it was okay. When she told me she loved me.

When she offered me her life like it was a gift instead of a curse.

And I don't know how to reconcile the man who wants to destroy her family with the man who couldn't bring himself to hurt her.

I'm going to have to figure it out.

Because this war isn't over.

It's only just begun.

Cas went to bed over an hour ago.

I didn’t.

I don’t sleep often.

This is not unusual. I have never been a good sleeper, not since I was a child, not since the particular quality of the dark in my father's house taught me that staying alert was a more valuable skill than staying rested.

I sit in the kitchen at three in the morning and I don't turn the light on. I sit in the dark with my hands flat on the table and I let Cas's words sit in the room with me the way you let something air out that has been shut in too long.

She's trying to survive you.

I have turned that sentence over about forty-seven times in the last two hours. I keep waiting for the angle from which it stops being true and I haven't found it yet.

Meekan is dead. Steven is somewhere between dead and dying. Masen has a bullet in his chest. The three names I've had circled in red for two years are accounted for and the only thing I feel is the particular flatness of a man who burned something down and is standing in the ash trying to remember why he lit the match.

I remember why.

I remember exactly why.

Emery. Neave. Miles.

I say their names in my head the way I always do, not as grief, not yet, but as the spine of everything. The reason the machine keeps running.

Except the machine ran tonight and it didn't feel like I expected.

I thought it would feel like it was finished. Like a door closing on the right side of something. Instead it feels like standing in a room where someone just left and the air still holds the shape of them.

She said make him feel the pain you felt.

And I couldn't.

I'm not examining that right now. I've filed it under things that don't mean what they appear to mean and I'm leaving it there until I have the structural capacity to look at it without the whole building coming down.

What I will look at is this, Caspian is right that she is trying to survive. And I have been making that as difficult as possible on purpose, because her surviving was never part of the plan and somewhere between the beginning of this and tonight that plan started to feel like a different kind of loss.

I don't know what to do with that.