"No." I shake my head. Every movement feels like it costs something. "You saw his face. That wasn't anger. That was—" Isearch for the word and can't find one big enough. "Shutdown. Total and permanent shutdown."
Asher reaches down. "Come on. Let me take you somewhere. You can't stay here."
"Where?" The question comes out with a laugh that isn't a laugh. "I don't have anywhere to go. The safe house is his. The compound is his. Everything—"Everything was his, and then ours, and now it's just his again and I'm just where I started."Everything is his."
"I have an apartment," he says quietly. "You can stay there. Just until?—"
"Until what, Asher?" I look at him then, really look at him — this careful, guarded man who showed me things about himself that I suspect he's shown almost no one, who is standing here offering me shelter while his best friend just ejected me from the premises. "Until Xavier decides he doesn't hate me? That could be never. That is probably never."
"You don't know that."
"Yes, I do." I stand without his hand, on principle or stubbornness or some last vestige of a self that refuses to be completely dismantled. "Tell Zay—" I stop. What do I tell Zay?I'm sorry I shattered something that was already fragile? I'm sorry I turned out to be exactly as dangerous as I should have known I'd be to them?" Tell him I'm sorry. For everything."
"Val, wait?—"
But I’m already moving, already swinging onto the bike Zay brought to the safehouse, my hands fumbling over the controls as I kick it to life, the engine roaring beneath mewhile one frantic calculation pulses through my mind—forward momentum is the only thing standing between me and complete dissolution.
The ride back to the safe house is something that happens to my body while my mind loops the same thirty seconds on repeat —did you kill Marcus, yes, get out, no longer mine— until the words lose meaning and become just sound, just the shapes of a world that no longer exists.
I park in the driveway and sit there for a moment, engine ticking quiet as it cools, looking at the house. This building where I fell in love three different times in three different ways. Where I started to believe something was possible.
All built on lies.
I go inside. I pack with my hands on autopilot while my mind is somewhere else entirely — folding shirts that still smell like Xavier's laundry detergent, tucking toiletries into a bag with the detached efficiency of someone who has gotten very good at leaving places behind.
Xavier's hoodie is lying across the bed. The one I steal every night. The one that's the closest thing I've had to a security object since I was a child — soft worn cotton, huge on me, the scent of him embedded so deeply in the fibers that even the washing machine can't touch it.
I pick it up. Press my face into it. And the sound that comes out of me is something I've never heard myself make before — a grief that lives below language, below dignity, below the composed surface I've been maintaining for months. I cry into his hoodie until there's nothing left to cry, until I'm empty and hollow and my body is too tired to do anything except breathe.
Then I finish packing.
I'm outside securing my bag to the bike when headlights sweep the driveway. Zay's truck. He gets out with the careful movements of a man who has been sitting in the cab for a while working up to this, who knows what he's walking into and is walking into it anyway.
"Val—"
"Don't." My hands don't stop working the straps. "Whatever you came to say — just don't."
"You can't leave like this."
"Like what?" I look at him then. "Like someone who was just officially expelled from the only place she'd felt at home in years? Yeah, Zay. I can. I have to." I pull the last strap tight. "Xavier was clear about my status. I heard him."
"He's in shock. He's hurt and?—"
"And he's right." My voice comes out harder than I intended, because the alternative is breaking again and I have no more breaking left. "I lied to him, Zay. To all of you. Every single day for weeks. I looked him in the eye and I lied because I was a coward, and I can't even be angry at him for being angry. IkilledMarcus."
"It was self-defense?—"
"It was still hisbrother!" I stop. Take a breath. Lower my voice, because the desperation inside it is embarrassing. "Whether it was justified or not, I took Marcus away from him. And then I hid it. I don't get to be surprised by this."
Zay steps closer. He does this thing — has always done this thing — where he moves into your space like you asked him to, like proximity is a language he speaks more fluently than words. "Where will you go?"
"Doesn't matter."
"It matters to me." His hand finds my wrist. Gentle. Just resting there. "Val. I love you. That doesn't stop because things got complicated."
The words put a crack in the wall I'm building. I feel it, a hairline fracture. "Stop," I say. "Stop loving me. It'll be easier."
"I don't want easier. I want you."