Page 236 of Breathe Like Hell

The breaking, the splintering, the fracturing.

And now it was my job to help keep him together. I was the Sigeian meant to save him, despite the fact that I’d never be strong enough.

I’d dug into his mind on the first day I came back, on the day I learned about Micah’s death, and he hated me then. He didn’t hate me now because he didn’t get a fucking choice. I would not let him hide from me anymore.

My chest convulsed on a sob, like the cry was being ripped out of me, ripped from my fucking soul. I dug my fingernails into the ground, Mason’s agony suffocating me, his instability tearing me apart.

I understood now.

Understood why he couldn’t show me this, even when I’d begged him.

Because I couldn’t survive him. He’d known that long before I did. Fractures—real fractures—were terrifying in a way I’d never known. The magnitude of his power was far too vast for me to comprehend before now, before I could actually feel it tearing his mind apart. He was going to kill me, and I’d entirely resigned myself to that fate now. I couldn’t control him, couldn’t be his anchor in the storm. The storm was too fucking strong.

I need you, Micah.

Fresh tears poured down my cheeks.

I flattened my hands to the ground as if I could still feel him here. As if he was rooted in this soil. His blood, his ichor, his sweat and tears and breath. His weight anchoring me to the cliff all those weeks ago, holding me so close to death but never letting me go. My head tipped back over the edge and my chest full of exhilaration, my hair tangling in the wind.

A predator, protecting his prey. Shielding me from everything else, protecting me to his death.

I remembered his words on another day, whispered into cold air in the forest after he caught me, pinned me down. Tears on my face and pain in my heart and emptiness in my womb.

I love you more than my own life.

He’d meant it.

I couldn’t cope with that.

I wished he hadn’t done it. Between me and him, his life was so much more important. He contributed to the world. He made it better. He impacted people. Me, I did nothing except exist silently, all alone in my dark corner, never daring to reach out, never parting my lips to speak.

I am no one. I am nothing.

I have always been nothing. Crushed up small and meaningless, buried under the weight of my endless shame.

My mind was breaking into pieces, already torn apart by my grief and now Mason.

I was never going to survive this.

There was no version of this where Mason and I made it through together.

I would cling to him with white knuckles until I bled, until I couldn’t breathe through my tears, until the rest of my mind was gone, but it would never be enough.

Immortality wasn’t survivable like this.

My fingers dug into the dirt on the cliff, all the threads I’d tied around Mason’s soul stretched to the brink of snapping, ready to break apart and let him shatter irreversibly. We barely spoke to each other anymore, but he’d told me before that a fracture was quick—or that was how it’d seemed to him. Micah could take it from him, and then it was over. It didn’t keep regenerating, the same way anger or sadness did. It was a spike of massive instability, and if you stopped it, there was no aftermath.

The problem was that Mason was no longer capable of single fractures.

He had no desire to stop himself. He couldn’t. The weight of his grief had eroded his control into nothing, and all of the weight rested on my shoulders alone.

As soon as I burned through one, a new one was there to replace it. For hours, this happened. I couldn’t even stand up when it happened. All I could do was lay on the ground, clinging to the solidness of the rocks, crying and gritting my teeth and trying to keep him from falling into the void.

I wouldn’t survive many more days like today.

My stomach lurched with nausea, and I rolled to the side, spitting acid into the dirt.

What I hadn’t known before becoming Sigeian myself was every emotion I took had weight. A weight I was transferring onto myself.