The words get tangled up somewhere between my throat and my teeth, caught in a web of rage and fear and memories I can’t outrun.
I keep seeing Xavier’s hand around the back of my neck—not tonight, but years ago.
Thirteen years old. Bloody. Bruised.
Marcus’s gun pressed to my temple, cold as a kiss from death itself, and Xavier stepping in front of it like I was worth something.
Like I mattered.
“He’s mine,” Xavier had said. Calm. Certain. Like he was stating a fact of nature rather than gambling his life on a half-feral kid with blood under his fingernails. “You want him, you go through me first.”
Marcus had laughed. Called us both dead men walking.
But he’d lowered the gun.
Now Xavier’s lying somewhere behind these doors fighting for his life, and I’m out here useless, drowning in the kind of guilt that tastes like iron and feels like drowning.
“Please,” I breathe, voice cracking. “Don’t let my sins fall on him. Don’t take him because of what I did—because of what I wanted. Punish me. Whatever price you’re asking. Whatever pound of flesh. Just… not him. Not Xavier.”
I think of Valentina—locked in that room across the city, probably plotting a hundred ways to kill me, completely unaware that her captor is sitting in a hospital waiting room praying she doesn’t become collateral damage to his sins.
“And not her,” I add, quieter. The words feel like a confession, shameful and raw. “She didn’t ask for any of this. I took her. I put her in the middle of this. Don’t punish her for what I did.”
The prayer feels wrong. Feels like asking God to protect the lamb while you’re still holding the knife.
But I say it anyway, because I don’t know what else to do.
Because Valentina’s face keeps flashing behind my eyes alongside Xavier’s—her fury, his stillness—and the guilt of wanting her is tangled so tight with the guilt of failing him that I can’t separate them anymore.
Two people. Two sins. One prayer that probably won’t be heard by anyone.
But I say it anyway.
“Sir?”
The voice cuts through my haze like a blade through fog.
I jerk my head up, unprepared for sound, for softness, for anything that isn’t the thunder of my own pulse.
A nurse stands a few feet away, soft blue scrubs too gentle for a place like this.
She looks at me the way you look at a wounded animal—sad, careful, ready to dart back if it lunges.
“You can’t sit on the floor,” she says gently.
I blink. Look down.
I’m on my knees.
In the middle of the waiting room, knees pressed into cold tile, hands clenched around Xavier’s blood-soaked rings like rosary beads.
I’d slipped them off his limp fingers before they loaded him into the ambulance—couldn’t stand the thought of them getting lost, of some nurse pocketing them, of any part of him being somewhere I couldn’t protect it.
I don’t remember sliding off the chair. Don’t remember letting gravity drag me down.
Don’t remember anything except the pressure behind my eyes and the desperate, animal need to bargain with a God I’m not sure I believe in anymore.
“I’m fine,” I rasp.