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Elise's POV
The wind smelled like salt and ash.
Not in a poetic, notebook-margin, "write about the sea" kind of way.
It smelled like something decomposing.
Like the last breath of a body that died with its eyes open.
It sank into my hair, my clothes, my marrow—gritty and wet, like it had clawed its way up from the belly of the ocean just to wrap itself around me and stay. It tasted like metal in the back of my throat. Like I'd bitten down on a lightning bolt and couldn't unclench my jaw.
I sat in the sand, barefoot, the cold grains grinding into my palms and heels like ground glass. It was all I had. Sensation. Proof I was here. Proof I still had skin.
My knees were drawn to my chest in a makeshift cage—bone over bone. Containment. My ribs a prison for my heart, which had forgotten how to beat without violence.
The ocean didn't soothe me.
It hissed.
It growled.
It accused.
Every wave sounded like someone being dragged back to their worst memory.
And I didn't want to be next.
Leona and Ryder had drifted away, their laughter brittle and too sharp—like shattered porcelain being swept across a linoleum floor. They were trying. To be normal. To play pretend.
But I couldn't join them.
Because I didn't know who I was pretending to be anymore.
Carson had kissed my temple before he left.
His lips were too warm against my cold skin.
The contact was gentle—like a whisper, like breath through silk—but it hit me like a trigger.
I flinched.
Not outwardly. Never that.
But inside, something reeled.
Because the last person to touch me that gently was the man who taught me how to write code with bruised fingers and a dislocated shoulder.
Because tenderness, in my world, was a trap. A lure. A lie dipped in honey.
Because I didn't know if I was allowed to feel safe anymore.
I didn't ask where Carson was going. His silence already screamed.
And the look in his eyes? It was the same look I'd seen in the mirror after I hacked into my father's server, sobbing so hard I could barely see, fingers trembling over keys like detonators.
It was the look of someone who had already crossed the line—and knew there was no going back.
So I stayed.
I stayed and watched the ocean pull itself apart, again and again.
I stayed and tasted the static air.
I stayed and didn't move when my hands started to tremble. When my nails dug crescent moons into my thighs. When my brain told me to get up, run, disappear, don't be seen.
But I couldn't move.
Because the fear wasn't coming from the outside anymore.
It was inside me.
And it was quiet.
And quiet, I'd learned, was worse than any scream.
Because in the quiet, the memories bled in.
They crawled under my eyelids.
They whispered through my teeth.
Damian.
Blood on Carson's hoodie.
My father's voice counting backwards from ten.
The sound of rope tightening around a child's wrist.
A password buried in a lullaby.
I'd been awake through it all.
Through pain.
Through firewalls.
Through lockdown mode.
Through killing my way out with nothing but code and fury and teeth.
But now?
Now I was just here.
On a beach.
Breathing like it hurts.
Eventually, my body remembered how to stand.
Legs shaking, hands numb.
I didn't feel human. I felt like a file someone forgot to delete. A ghost without a story.
When I made it back to the car, I folded myself into the passenger seat.
Curled small.
Back pressed to the cold glass of the window, skin crying out for contact—but not too much. Never too much.
The seat still smelled like him.
Carson.
Burnt sugar.
Gunmetal.
Old paperbacks cracked at the spine.
The kind of scent that clung like memory. Or maybe a warning.
I closed my eyes.
And for the first time since I'd torn through my father's server with digital knives and a suicide wish,
I slept.
Not because I wanted to.
Because my body finally overruled me.
Later
I don't know how long I was out when I heard it.
The soft click of the door.
The shift in the air.
Carson.
He slid into the seat beside me like a phantom returning home. The engine murmured to life, and the car began to hum—a lullaby for the broken.
He didn't speak. Not right away.
Neither did I.
But I could feel him watching me.
"Did you eat?" he asked, voice low and frayed.
"No."
"You okay?"
"…I don't know."
My voice didn't sound like mine.
It sounded like someone else's confession.
He reached across the center console and took my hand. Gently. Reverently.
His thumb brushed over the raw red line around my wrist.
I didn't even remember doing that.
Chewing on my skin.
Trying to gnaw the anxiety out of my bloodstream.
He didn't ask questions.
He didn't tell me to stop.
He just held me.
Like I was allowed to be fragile.
Like I was more than function.
Back at school, hours earlier—while I was collapsing inside myself—Carson was peeling back walls with bleeding hands. Breaking into forgotten places. Bleeding for answers.
Behind the janitor's closet.
Behind the rust-stained sink.
A false wall.
He tore it open like a surgeon pulling back flesh. The blade sliced his knuckle. Blood bloomed.
He didn't flinch.
He read the hidden Morse etched into the wall like it had been written on his skin.
"She doesn't have time."
"They're watching from the west wing."
"Save her. Or bury her."
This wasn't a message.
It was a threat written like a prayer.
And Carson?
He didn't pray.
He avenged.
Back in the car, I opened my eyes.
The city was bleeding past the windows in smears of gold and neon. Everything was too loud. Too fast. Too alive.
"I used to dream of freedom," I said, voice barely audible.
Carson didn't answer. He just listened.
"Thought it would taste like candy. Or fire. Something I could swallow and finally feel in my blood."
Still nothing. But I felt him tighten—like a gun being cocked.
"My father made sure I tasted everything else first. Shame. Rope. His rules, written in bruises. He told me my ribs were his safe. That I was meant to store his sins."
Carson's knuckles whitened around the wheel.
"I'm not afraid of dying," I whispered. "I'm afraid of surviving. Of waking up tomorrow still being this."
"This?" he murmured, eyes flicking toward me.
"A haunted house. Every room filled with echoes. Every mirror cracked. People enter, but they don't stay. Because I don't know how to stop bleeding on the floorboards."
He pulled over.
Parked. Turned to face me.
And then—slowly—he reached out and touched the corner of my eye, where old tears had dried into salt.
His thumb moved like a ritual. Like he was trying to rewrite something permanent.
"Then let me be the ghost that stays," he said.
I wanted to laugh.
I wanted to rip my throat open and scream until someone put me back together.
Instead—
I kissed him.
Not because I was in love.
But because something inside me had begun to rot.
And I needed to feel anything other than that decay.
And for a moment,
his lips on mine felt like a match held against ice.
A thaw.
A sting.
A warning.
Carson's POV
Adrenaline isn't high.
It's a sickness.
A doctrine carved into the bone.
A religion with no heaven—just fire, pain, and the illusion of control.
And I?
I was its fucking prophet.
Baptized in wreckage.
Anointed in gasoline.
Raised by a god who bled boys into monsters and called it sacrifice.
The road wasn't winding—it was writhing.
It wanted to drag me down, snap my spine between the guardrails and grin.
I'll give it a try.
The car roared beneath me like it wanted to break free of the world.
Like it wanted to shatter the rules of physics, of fate, of mercy.
Speedometer: 130. 140. 160.
Faster.
Let it kill me.
The engine howled like something feral.
The tires kissed the pavement like sinners kissing the edge of hell.
In the back seat, my mother bled through the seams of her clothes.
Her blood was warm. Too warm. Like it had just been stolen from someone else's chest.
"Don't look back. Just drive."
Her voice was cracked porcelain, half-remembered lullabies and the scent of burned roses.
I didn't look back.
I couldn't.
Because if I did—I'd see them.
The shadows.
The men.
The knives dressed in suits and doctrine.
My father's fucking choirboys.
They didn't chase.
They cleansed.
They erased souls like typos.
And I? I was the glitch in their hymn.
This wasn't a race.
This was an exorcism by horsepower.
This was me screaming through every turn, daring death to blink first.
I didn't win because I was skilled.
I won because I didn't care if I made it out breathing.
My hands were shaking when I pulled into the safehouse.
Knuckles bone-white.
Hoodie soaked in her blood.
My mother sagged in my arms like a question I didn't have the answer to.
Damian opened the door with that haunted look he wore too well.
Alex was already inside—his hands steady, his eyes tired.
"You're running on fumes," Alex muttered.
"I'm already a fucking ghost," I snapped.
They worked on her. Stitched her up like she was more code than human.
I sat on the ground.
Hands open. Useless.
Covered in someone else's life and too cracked to scream about it.
She murmured my name before the morphine dragged her under.
Like she was apologizing for giving birth to me.
I left.
Let them be good sons.
Let them save her.
The cafe stank of rust and regret.
Makoto found me by the window. I don't remember falling.
Just the sound of my breath skipping tracks.
My body is forgetting how to exist.
Hospital. Fluorescent lights. White sheets and the smell of formaldehyde hope.
They said stroke.
Stress. Trauma. Built-up damage.
They said I was lucky.
I wanted to laugh. But my mouth didn't work right anymore.
In the blur, I heard voices.
Alex—his concern laced in cursing.
Leona—trying to be brave for both of us.
And Elise.
Chaton didn't speak much.
She didn't have to.
She just stayed.
Like silence was the only thing strong enough to hold me down.
She held my hand.
It was small.
Warm.
Real.
And I—I was a fucking wreck dressed in hospital linen and wires.
When I woke up, the light was wrong.
Too white. Too alive.
Elise was there.
Red-eyed.
Razor-edged.
"You lied," she whispered.
My mouth was dry. Tongue heavy. No words. Only static behind my eyes.
"You said if you died, no one would care."
"That no one needed you."
Her voice cracked.
Like something sacred breaking in two.
She didn't cry like girls in movies.
She cried like someone choking on rust.
"I need you."
Three words.
Simple.
But they didn't land softly.
They hit.
Like bullets behind the ribs.
Like truth crawling into the open for the first time.
She needed me.
And all I could do was shake.
My hands twitched—fingers curling like I was trying to hold onto something I'd never deserved.
My throat burned.
I didn't speak.
I couldn't.
Because every word I knew tasted like ash and apology.
Because love wasn't a language I spoke—it was a siren call I kept running from.
Because I didn't believe her.
Because if I believed her, I'd have to stop dying.
And I don't know how to do that.
I stared at her like a man looks at a match when he's already drowning in gasoline.
Not grateful.
Not hopeful.
Just mad.
Mad at the world for putting her in front of me.
Mad at myself for wanting to be enough.
My lips moved.
But I didn't say "thank you."
Didn't say "I'll stay."
Didn't say "I love you."
I said—
"...don't. Don't need me."
I said it again.
"Don't."
And again, softer.
"Don't."
Because if she did?
I'd have to become something I didn't know how to be.
Alive.
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