I didn’t shout. I didn’t curse. There was nothing to fight anymore.
It was over.
My daughter was dead, and Fox hadn’t moved a muscle. His heavy hand stayed on her head, fingers playing with strands of faded hair.
Silent tears glided down my cheeks. I never stopped rocking, holding the last warmth of my daughter’s body.
“Mummy, would you be sad if I left?” The memory came from nowhere and I curled in on myself with pain. “Yes, sweetheart. I’d be very sad. But you know how to stop me from feeling sad, don’t you?”
Her little brow puckered. “How?”
I scooped her up and blew raspberries on her tiny belly. “By never leaving me.”
I traced her every feature, from her heart-shaped face and full cheeks, to her dark eyelashes and blue lips.
“You left me,” I whispered. “You made me sad.”
Fox made a heart-wrenching noise in his chest and stood quickly. Staggering, he looked as if he would pass out. “This can’t happen. It can’t.”
His entire body trembled, hands open and closing, eyes wide and wild. He looked completely and utterly destroyed.
He needed soothing. He needed to let his grief out. He needed to find healing not just for Clara’s death but his awful past. But I had no reserves to console him. I had nothing left to give.
Fox looked at Clara one last time and every ounce of humanness, every splash of colour that Clara had conjured in him faded to grey, to black. “It isn’t f**king fair. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like this. Not so soon. Not like this!”
His rage battered me like a heavy squall and I couldn’t do it. I needed to remain in a little cocoon of serenity where I could say goodbye to my wonderful daughter. Hunching over Clara’s body, I shut him out. I opened the gates to my grief and let myself be swallowed by tears.
“I don’t want you to be sad, mummy. So I’ll never ever, ever leave you.”
The memory brought a tsunami of tears, and I lost all meaning of life as I tried to chase my daughter into the underworld. My ears rang as Fox howled and every good and redeemable thing in him died.
There was nothing left to say. Nothing I could do to change what had happened.
Turned out, I couldn’t save either of them.
“I can’t do this. I can’t—” Fox snapped with the brittle rage. He left in a flurry of shadows and sin, leaving me to pick up the broken pieces of my completely shattered life.
Chapter 18
I thought my darkest hour was the moment I killed my brother. It took the agency months to break me. I withstood hours upon hours of torture, all so I could drag out my brother’s life.
But in the end, I’d done what they asked—not to prove my cold-heartedness and obedience, but because death was a better existence for him. Frostbitten, drowning with pneumonia, he’d wasted away from a bright, intelligent boy to a bag of rattling bones.
I’d put him out of his misery, hoping someone would do the same for me.
But I’d live that day a thousand times over to avoid watching Clara die.
She stole my will to live.
She stole my humanity.
I no longer wanted to fight.
I wanted to go Ghost and forget.
About everything.
I needed to inflict pain.
I needed to be inflicted.
I needed the sweet salvation of agony.
I needed to f**king die.
Anything. I would’ve accepted anything to be free of the revolving horror in my head.
She’s dead.
It’s over.
She hadn’t f**king cured me. She destroyed me. She took every good part left inside and stole it when she took her last breath.
I couldn’t handle seeing Zel come apart wrapped around her daughter. I couldn’t fathom the intolerable agony I would inflict if tried to console her.
Fuck, this conditioning!
Every part of me hummed with confusion. I wanted to fight. But I wanted to hold Hazel and wipe away her tears. I wanted to murder. But I wanted to scoop up the body of Clara and share my life with her. I wanted a miracle. I wanted to be f**king free so I could be there for the woman I loved.
But you’re a machine. Love and touch aren’t permitted. They would never be f**king permitted.
As much as I wanted to fall to my knees and wrap my arms around the two most important people in my life, I couldn’t. One touch and I’d kill. My mind wasn’t strong enough to override my training. And that shredded me, stole all my hope, and plummeted me into the dark.
Kill. Sever. Bleed. Devour.
Violent anger squeezed my muscles until I shuddered with the need to kill. I’d been around death—it reminded me of my past and my true identity.
I gripped my skull. I refused to regress. I refused to slip down the slide back into Ghost.
“My sheep!” Clara’s voice sprang into my head, making me howl in heartbreak. She’d gone. She’d left me. She’d taken all my progress, all my happiness with her.
I was nothing without her. Nothing.
I skipped over sadness and went straight to rage. My life was a f**king joke. Full of injustice and unfairness and every f**ked up circumstance. Time and time again fate played with me—granting me a sliver of hope before crushing it completely and leaving me in despair.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Clara. Her collapsing. The wheezing. The sweet innocent taste of her as I forced oxygen into her failing lungs.
She broke my f**king heart, looking at me with terrified eyes, begging me to help her.
“Please, Roan.” Vasily’s blue eyes met mine, swimming with tears and fear. “I’m so cold, brother.”
The flashback exploded as my ears echoed with the sounds of Clara choking, gasping, dying.
She’d been the colour my life was missing. She splashed me in yellows and oranges; she turned my black soul into a riot of rainbows. And now her light was gone, leaving me in the dark once again.
“That’s it, Operative Fox. You know who you are. Fight us no more.”
Hazel.
After everything she’d given me, I couldn’t go back. I wasn’t strong enough to ride through the storm of sadness—I couldn’t be there for her.
Everything I’d worked so hard for didn’t matter anymore. What was the point when all the good things in my life were stolen anyway? No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t cure illness or bring loved ones back to life.
I couldn’t change the past—just like I couldn’t change the future. It was written in stone, crushing my bones, wrapping me in chains that I’d only just begun to shed.