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“Titus?” The shaky tone of my voice reflects the uncertainty swirling inside of me. I can’t figure out what’s real and what’s a dream. If this is Heaven, or hell. “Is this real?”
“Yes. It’s real.”
My chest turns cold with panic as I look over the surroundings, the quiet room in the cabin that seems real. But how?
“I … I watched you die.”
“Yes. You did.”
“Then, how?”
“Lilith and the others came for me. They took me back to the convent.”
I want to believe him. I want to stay here, in this place, but I watched him die!
“Back to the convent? Legion? Didn’t they attack?”
“Doctor Levins brought us back through the passageway. Hid us away from Legion soldiers, and told them we’d fled. He tended my wounds for days after.” The remorse in his voice weighs heavy on his words, and if I could bring myself to look at him right now, I wonder if he’d have tears in his eyes. “Days you suffered.”
I clamp my eyes against the flashes of memory passing through my mind. No. If I allow myself to focus on them, they’ll drag me further into the dark pit that waits to swallow me from below. I won’t think about it.
Not yet.
“How is this possible?”
“Doctor Levins healed you.”
It’s a trick, a voice inside my head says. A cruel trick. Remus pulled a number of tricks on me, and this is the worst. He’s lying. “That stab wound was fatal. I know it was fatal. I should be dead.”
“You should. But Doctor Levins injected you. With Alpha antibodies.”
“What?”
“For the last week, you’ve been recovering. Healing.”
“A week?”
How did a week slip by? How do I have no memory of the time between? Only flashes of images. Of Agatha. And Lilith. And …
“Remus?”
“Dead. Unfortunately. And what I wouldn’t give to tear him apart all over again.” Morbid fascination swirls behind his glare, as if he’s imagining it, and a deadly promise clings to his words like a thick, black poison.
“It’s true, then. What I saw in dreams.”
“He can’t hurt you anymore. Ever. Agatha, either, for that matter.”
“How?”
“Once I had my strength, and Atticus was well enough to fight, we stormed the prison. Killed every guard and set fire to the building.” He lifts his hands and curls them into tight fists, and what sounds like a growl fills the brief pause that follows. “I ripped his bones from his body with my bare hands. Made Remus suffer. And still it’s not enough.” Resting his elbows on his knees, he bows his head, stroking his hands back and forth over his skull. “Tell me … what did he do to you?”
Tears blur his form, and that cold nausea settles deep inside my gut again. I shake my head, refusing to relive those moments. The endless stretches of suffering and silence.
When he looks up at me, torment darkens his eyes, like that of an animal begging to be set free from its cage. A grim rigidity sweeps over him like hardening stone, and something murderous flickers in his eye. A fissure. A crack that threatens to pulverize his composure.
As if he knows. As if he can see everything written all over my face.
Not even my silence can spare him from this. Or me, for that matter. The scars and shame are permanently etched in my mind. A part of me is still adrift on that black, placid sea, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find safe footing again. I don’t know if I can ever feel whole again.
