by Meg Collett
My grin slipped. “That’s why you’re here.”
“Somehow, even though I only sought to break her, she forgave me. And we became best friends. Sisters. Like you and Sunny. We were in constant contact until that night. We’d spoken on the phone not hours before she tucked you into that closet. I was the one who cried for her. She was so brave, Ollie.”
Deep in my stomach, I felt a shift. Not a flutter. Not indigestion or imagination. But Pinto. I knew, in my heart, my baby had moved. I pressed my fingers harder into my stomach, curling my hand, and closed my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Marley whispered. “I told her and I’m sorry and I’m sorry I have to tell you now.”
I looked up.
Dread washed through me.
“What more is there to tell?”
Marley’s face scrunched in pain. Pain for me. “How it all ends.”
I dropped my hand from my belly. “No,” I whispered. “You already told me.”
“Ollie, I’m sorry. But there’s more. If there was another way …”
“Surely there has to be. There has—”
“They can’t be changed. The visions. They can’t. Trust me, I’ve tried. Irena tried. Ollie,” Marley said, her voice breaking, “everything has been leading to this. It all comes down to this.”
My heart tripped and stuttered.
I didn’t want to know.
I wasn’t my mother.
I wasn’t brave or strong or fierce. I wasn’t the woman she was. I wasn’t even close.
I didn’t know her.
I didn’t have the chance.
But if I had, if I’d known Irena Volkova, I doubted there would ever be another woman like her.
As her daughter, I could only hope to be a shadow of the woman she’d been.
I swallowed, looked up from the rug at my feet, and met Marley’s eyes. “Tell me,” I said. “Tell me all of it.”
“I wish it were pretty,” Marley whispered. “I wish it was a truth that would leave you whole and safe and surrounded by the people you love.”
I swallowed, preparing myself. But somehow, I’d always known it would come to this.
There was no way, in this war, that we would all come out alive.
“Someone’s going to die,” I murmured.
Marley nodded.
“Someone I love.”
She dipped her chin again.
It could be me. Pinto. Luke. Sunny. Hatter. Sam. Zero. It could be everyone. It could be the school. It could be this life and this image of my mother I was trying so hard to replicate. It could be a million things.
When Marley told me, when she told me the ending of it all, it didn’t wreck me.
But I knew.
I knew.
I would lose so much tomorrow night.
Tomorrow night, it would all come to an end.
And no, I would not be whole.
None of us would.
She told me. I listened.
And I tried to be brave like my mother as Marley Summers told me her vision of the future that would ruin my entire world.
E I G H T E E N
Sunny
We got Zero to the rook’s nest without incident. By the time Hatter got help to pull Zero up, I’d stopped looking for her pulse. It was getting weaker and weaker, and searching for it took longer and longer. Thad and I secured her in the harness Hatter and the guards had lowered and watched as they lifted her into the sky.
When we were inside the school, the guards rushed Zero to the ward. Lori and Melanie, the nurses on duty, were already at work when I arrived. I stood on the other side of the door, watching through the oval circle of glass as they got to work on Zero’s wounds and set her up for an emergency blood transfusion. The heart rate monitor attached to her showed a faint pulse.
I turned away from the window and sagged against the door.
My clothes were stiff with blood, my body stiffer. I couldn’t move my right arm well, and deep inside me, the place that lit up brighter than a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve when I had ’swang saliva in my system was flickering darker and darker. I was fading. Sinking. Coming down from the high.
I took a deep breath to stir myself back to life and blinked to clear the haze from my vision. The guards who’d carried Zero into the ward had returned to their post. Had Hatter come with us? I hadn’t even noticed.
But he must have known I was on saliva. He’d always been good at catching that. Which meant I had some explaining to do to keep him from worrying.
I took a few unsteady steps toward the stairs, but by the time I reached the school’s front door, I was walking steadily. Mostly.
Outside, I glanced around, considering the barracks and then the front gate. But my eyes drifted to the rook’s nest tucked farther down the fence, the one we’d rappelled down. I started toward it.
It was getting late, and the few lights on the grounds were off. But the moon was bright enough that I easily spotted his shadow up there. I stood at the foot of the ladder and sighed. When I reached up to grab the first rung with my right arm, I hissed in pain.
“Should have let them stitch you up,” Hatter said, his voice floating down from above.
“The bites aren’t deep enough,” I said through gritted teeth. I started the slow process of pulling myself up rung by rung, inch by inch.
“I’d offer to help, but …” He waved his one hand down at me with a mocking smile.
I looked away from his manic grin and focused on climbing. When I was a few feet from the top, he reached down and pulled me up the rest of the way.
He set me on my feet and backed away to the opposite side of the small platform on top of the fence. I leaned against the railing to take some of my weight off my feet.
I didn’t know what to say, and for a long time, neither of us spoke. He knew I’d been high when I’d arrived at the rook’s nest and he’d helped pull Zero up. And he knew that I knew. But neither of us said anything about it. Because what could we say? I wasn’t an addict, not really. I’d been bitten. It was bound to happen, and I couldn’t help that my reaction to saliva was fearlessness.
None of this was my fault.
Right?
“Hatter,” I said on a breathy exhale of air from deep within my lungs. “What’s going on? What happened?”
He barked out a bitter laugh, and I grimaced. “The question should be what hasn’t happened.”
“So, what hasn’t happened?”
He wrapped his arm around himself, his fingers pulling at the limp sleeve at his side. I watched the aimless motion for as long as I could before I had to look away. “You and me,” he whispered. “That hasn’t happened.”
My eyes fluttered closed. I swallowed. When I opened them again, Hatter was staring right at me, waiting. “I’ve tried.”
A lie and he knew it. “You haven’t.”
“Neither have you.”
A truth and he knew it. He turned away from me. We looked out in opposite directions of the nest. Me toward the school, him toward the woods beyond the fence, the area he could no longer go.
There would never be a good time to talk about what had happened. To him. To me. To us. But it had to happen. At some point, I would have to say the words.
I took a deep breath and said them. “I’ll never be who you want me to be.”
He jerked back. He raked his hand through his hair, and even that seemed like a movement half realized, like he might have just remembered again, for the countless time, that his other arm was gone. “But you were. Jesus Christ, you were just that girl a few months ago.”
“A lot has changed.”
“Not that much. Things couldn’t have changed that much.” He grimaced, knowing exactly how much things had changed.
We’d been at odds since the semester began. Maybe even before that. Even now, in the tiny space of the rook’s nest, we were at opposite sides, putting as much space as possible between us. I wanted to shake him and make him see how much I�
�d changed, to open his eyes and make him see me not as the Cowardly Lyon, but as me, the girl who would pick up her knives and fight. But perhaps he felt the same way. Maybe he wanted to shake me until I realized who he’d become. How he’d changed. How far he’d fallen.
“Hatter, I know things have—”
“No,” he snapped, jerking around to glare at me. “Don’t make this about my arm. It’s not about my fucking arm.”
His tone lashed against my skin, and I winced.
He sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. Really.” His face crumbled as he stared at me.
The realization hit me. My heart crumbled the way Hatter’s face had. “Oh.”
Softer this time, he murmured, “You’ve changed, Sunshine.”
All this time, I’d thought his attitude toward me was about his arm. That I was hunting when he wasn’t. But I hadn’t been truly listening.
This was all about me.
Because I had changed.
And while I loved the fighter I’d become, the one who’d take Ollie’s place, Hatter didn’t.
I said the truth that had kept us far apart these past few months. “You don’t love me anymore.”
“Sunny,” he pleaded, “I don’t love the battles you want to fight. I don’t love the hunter you want to become. I don’t love that shit.”
“But you do it. It’s all you’ve ever wanted to do.”
“I know.” He turned his face away with a groan. “I know. But it’s my duty. It’s not yours. I fight so you don’t have to. So you can be a nurse and save people. So you can stay safe behind these fences I protect. That I keep safe. That’s what I do. Not you.”
I bristled at his words. “Because you’re a man? Because men are better fighters?”
“Hell no. Because this isn’t what you chose. You’re a brilliant nurse.”
“Why can’t I be a nurse and a hunter? Why do you want me to be scared and timid and the old version of me that I hated?”
He leaned back against the railing and put his head in his hand. His voice was muffled against his palm as he said, “At least then you’d be safe.”
I stared hard at the wooden boards. I wanted to yell and shout and push him. I wanted to demand that he understand. That he accept me. But who was I to ask that of him? If he loved the version of Sunny Lyons that I had discarded, who the heck was I to drag him along behind me? That wasn’t fair to either of us.
I was losing Hatter.
Tonight.
In this moment.
Hatter wasn’t mine anymore.
It came as a surprise, how I could physically feel my heartbreak. That jagged fault line zigged and zagged across the organ and tore it asunder. It took my breath away. My chest ached like my sternum might cave in and my blood might rush out.
I was losing Hatter.
Of their own accord, my legs walked me over to him. I threaded my arms around his waist and pressed my cheek against his chest. After a prolonged beat, he put his arm around me.
“This is the first time you’ve touched me since it happened,” he said, speaking the words into the night above my head.
I looked up at him. “You wouldn’t let me. That’s why I didn’t understand. I thought you were dealing with not hunting and you were jealous. I just didn’t understand, Hatter.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I was jealous. I still am. And I’m in denial. Part of this is about my arm. But not all of it.” He swallowed, his throat bobbing with the motion. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and dark red stubble lined his jaw.
“I’ll never be who you want me to be,” I repeated. But now the words were heavier on my tongue. They bore more meaning, more finality.
He dragged his gaze back to mine. “I know.”
“I like who I am. I want to fight. I like nursing, but I love fighting.”
Quieter, he whispered, “I know.”
I squeezed him tight before stepping away. His arm fell from my waist. Somehow, even that simple gesture deepened the ache in my heart. How easy it was to let go. After all the time and effort and fluttering stomachs and tentative touches and first kisses and first times and everything that had happened between us …
How easy it was to let it all go.
If I didn’t leave this rook’s nest right now, he would see me cry, and I didn’t want that. I couldn’t have that.
With the last dregs of energy I had left, I started for the ladder. Before I climbed down, I glanced at him. He was still staring off into the woods. I wondered if he imagined himself out there, fighting the fights he missed so desperately. Seeing him so deeply lost to those wishful imaginings broke me further.
“Goodbye, Hatter,” I murmured.
“Night, Sunshine,” he whispered to the dark trees. The words floated back to me.
Tears poured down my cheeks as I climbed down. Rung by rung. Step by step. Farther from Hatter than I’d ever been before.
On the ground, I turned and walked away. I made it across the courtyard, to the other side of the university on the opposite fence line from the rook’s nest Hatter was in, and pressed my back against the school’s vine-covered brick wall. With my head in my hands, my palms drenched in tears, I slid down. Sinking and sinking and sinking.
I drew my knees up, and I cried.
When the tears ran out, I stayed there. I watched the guards’ slow passes along the fence, their silhouettes black against the silver moonlight. Owls hooted in the woods, and the wind stirred the trees, rustling their branches. It was just warm enough to be pleasant, to be a nice night if it had been any other night.
Boot steps crunched toward me.
It took my eyes a moment to adjust enough for me to recognize Thad. He stopped beside me and stared down, his hands in his jeans pockets.
“How is she doing?” I kept my face to the shadows and swiped beneath my eyes. “Do I need to check on her?”
“She’s asleep. The other nurse checked her before I left.” Thad’s eyes narrowed at me. “Are you okay?”
I shrugged off his question. “Shouldn’t you be in the ward too? You fell down a well.”
He shot me a smirk. “You could have warned me before I fell into it. Do you know how disgusting that water was?”
With my tears dried, I could look at him fully. The ends of his unkempt, shaggy hair were wet and dripping onto his fresh flannel shirt. He smelled of soap with a spicy hint of cologne. He’d had time to shower and change since I’d left the ward. I wondered how long I’d been sitting out here, watching the moon and listening to the wind.
I turned away from him and shrugged. “Sorry. No time to warn you.”
“Mind if I sit down?”
Before I could answer, he was already taking a spot beside me. He was close enough that our shoulders brushed together. I should have told him to move over. I didn’t. It would have taken more energy than I had.
“Did you at least make him cry too?” he asked after a long silence.
So, he’d seen the tears. I wasn’t very good at hiding them it seemed.
I sniffled. “No.”
He nodded. For a while, we sat like that, in the moonlight, the warm summer breeze keeping us from shivering in the dark. An ache settled deep in my bones. I had cuts I should have treated. The sleeve of my right arm was stiff with blood. But the pain reminded me I was still breathing, that the exhaustion weighing me down hadn’t taken me completely.
It also took away from the dull throb in my heart.
“People change, Sunny.”
I must have nearly been asleep. When his words registered, I felt a flash of anger. “You think I don’t know that?”
He met my glare unwaveringly. “I think it’s easy to forget.”
Tears were hot again in the back of my throat, and I hated Thad for stirring them up after I’d fought so hard to shove them down. “Is this when you give me the great Thaddeus Booker’s wise talk on life and love and all the other bullcrap?”
“No.” He chuckled.
“I don’t have anything figured out. But I know that when shit happens, it’s easy to assume the people around us are changing with us. That we’re all keeping in step with each other. But when we look up after the dust has settled, we’re alone. The people we thought were with us are suddenly on the other side of this void. When we realize how separated we are, it’s too late to build a bridge.”
It hurt. It hurt worse than my arm. It hurt deep in my heart, and it hurt deep in my spirit. It hurt.
And I hated that he was right. I hated that Hatter and I had changed and we hadn’t changed together. I hated that there was no bridging the gap between us. I hated that I didn’t want to.
When the tears came again, I didn’t stop them.
Thad put his arm around my shoulders without pulling me to him or holding me tight. It was just a simple touch to say, “I’m here and we’re connected.” I wrapped my arms around my knees, bowed my head, and cried.
“Hey, there,” Thad said a while later when my tears had dried and I was nearly asleep again. His voice startled me. I glanced up to see Ollie standing in front of us with her arms crossed, frowning.
“What’s going on?” she asked, her eyes moving between me and Thad.
A beat later, I realized his arm was still around my shoulders, his hand rubbing my arm. I shifted away like she’d caught me doing something bad. I swiped away the last few tears from my cheeks.
“Sunny just needed a shoulder,” Thad said.
Ollie narrowed her eyes at him. “And you so chivalrously offered yours, I see?”
He smirked. “I am a gentleman.”
“Right.” She came closer to our spot against the brick wall. “Screw off.”
When he glanced at me, I nodded. “Thanks for the talk. I’m fine.”
He left without a backward glance, his feet eerily quiet across the ground. He moved like a panther stalking its prey, and I couldn’t help but be impressed, even if he unnerved me.
