Chapter 25 Makenna
TWENTY-FIVE
MAKENNA
There is blood coating my hands. It’s sticky between my fingers, under my nails, half dried in the creases of my knuckles. There’s a tightness in my chest, my breaths coming unevenly, like they don’t belong to me anymore.
Dayna is saying something to me, Ivy too, but it sounds like they’re talking to me from underwater. Everything feels hazy, and there’s a buzzing under my skin, the same numb, hollow panic I had the last time my hands were covered in blood.
I swallow, but my throat is so dry I can’t move past the lump there.
Don’t go there. Don’t think about him.
But it’s too late. My mind flashes back to another time, another memory. His weight on top of me, his hands around my neck, and the blood. So much blood.
Mine.
There’s a buzzing in my head. It’s too loud to think through.
I’m not there. He’s not here.
But my body still vibrates, and if my voice wasn’t caught somewhere between my lungs and my throat, I would be screaming.
“Makenna—can you look at me?”
I try, but Dayna is a smudge in front of me, a wash of colour I can’t focus on.
“I think she’s in shock.”
“Of course she is,” Dayna snaps. “She’s sitting here looking like she just walked out of an abattoir.”
I flinch. The blood isn’t mine, but it feels like I’m bleeding out on this chair. Everything is too bright, too loud even as it’s too quiet. My heart is beating so fast it makes my head spin.
And then I feel it.
The air changes, feels static and electric. Like gravity shifted. Like there was a disturbance in the force. That steady pulse I always have around him thumps through my veins. Someone says my name, maybe Ivy, but I can’t respond.
I lift my gaze, and as if he draws me like a magnet I instantly find him. He’s standing like a statue, as if someone has pulled the power cord out of him. My fingers tighten around the sleeves of my hoodie. His hoodie.
Zane doesn’t usually wear his feelings, but he’s looking at me like I’m the one bleeding out. But the blood isn’t mine. I know what he’s thinking, where his mind has gone. He’s seeing that room, that moment I’ve tried so hard to forget.
Don’t look at me like that, Zane… Don’t see me like a broken puppet with my strings cut.
Of course he’ll blame himself for this. I can already see the thought taking shape in his eyes. But this… This wasn’t his fault. Neither was that night.
Right now, he looks like he’s about to level entire cities to rubble because I’m painted in red and he’s seeing my blood, not hers.
He moves before he thinks, like his feet are in motion before his brain catches up. I flinch as he drops to his knees in front of me, not because I’m afraid of him, but because I know what he’s thinking.
What he’s reliving.
His hands hover over me, as if he doesn’t know where to put them.
If he can touch me.
“Firefly…” That name, the one that usually settles everything inside me, lands like a grenade between us. Broken and rasped, like it cost him everything to say it.
He scans me with haunted eyes, the same ones that looked at me like that the night he killed —
“It’s not…” The words get stuck. I clear my throat, try again. “It’s not mine.”
I expect relief. I don’t get it. He doesn’t care that it’s not mine. He cares that I’m wearing it like a fucking canvas. A portrait of trauma.
“She’s not hurt,” Dayna says in a soft voice. It feels like a gunshot in the quiet.
Zane doesn’t tear his eyes from mine. Like he thinks I’ll disappear if he looks away.
I’m not hurt, but I’m covered in Chloe’s blood. My breath hitches, elastic bands tighten around my lungs. “Get it off.”
“You’re okay—”
I don’t know who says it. I don’t care. All I can feel is the sticky warmth of someone else’s blood on me. “Get it off! Get it off!”
I wipe my hands down myself as if I can clean my skin, but most of it is dried, staining my skin.
I think I scream it. I’m not sure. My mind is unspooling.
And then his hands grab my face. Not hard, not painfully, but insistent. He’s cold, or maybe I am. I can’t tell. He grips me tight, not to ground me, but to stop me shaking.
“Makenna, eyes on me.”
I don’t know if it’s the command in his voice, or that my body recognises he’s my safe place, but I lift my lashes.
He’s breathing like he’s run a marathon, not crossed the room, his jaw so tight he looks angry, but he’s not. He’s holding on by the skin of his teeth.
“Zane.” His name cracks like glass shattering. Everything feels wrong. I feel wrong.
His thumb swipes under my eye, back and forth. Calm. Like he can stroke the fear out of me. Out of himself, too.
“I’m here.”
It’s such a small thing to say, but those screws tightening around my chest loosen just a fraction. He is here. I’m safe. Protected.
He straightens out of his crouch, looming over me like a mountain. And that’s what he is. Everest at my back. My rock.
There is no flinch this time when he cups my elbows and guides me to my feet. I lift out of the chair with his help, but my legs wobble the moment I’m upright, and my head swims.
He doesn’t let go, not for second, and his eyes don’t leave mine.
He’s reading every flicker of emotion on my face, cataloguing, analysing.
Reassure him… Tell him you’re fine.
But I can’t because I’m not okay. There isn’t enough time in the world to erase what I saw in that room.
I can hear the hum of voices behind me, footsteps and tension that feels too heavy, but I can’t lock in on anything but the pounding in my ears. I think I hear her name, mine too, but I can’t latch onto the words.
I take one step. Just one and then he scoops me into his arms. I should object, but I don’t. I loop my arms around his neck, bury my head into his chest and I try to unclench every muscle in my body.
“Firefly, I need to put you down.”
I don’t want to let go of him, but I do. He lowers me on the toilet like I’m made of fine China. I feel like I am. It’s been a long time since I felt this fragile, this disturbed.
Blood.
Soaking into the sheets.
Thick between my fingers.
I blink once, twice, three times before it morphs into cold tile and sterile porcelain. Zane leans into the shower cubicle, and a second later the water lets down. I listen to it tap against the plastic tray, the rhythm slowing my thoughts.
He’s quiet, too quiet.
The guilt pulses around him and the silence feels thick enough to drown in, but I don’t fill it. I don’t know what to say.
I don’t know how to scrub the image of Chloe bleeding out on that bed from my mind.
He doesn’t ask permission. He grabs the hem of my hoodie and pulls it slowly up my body, like he’s afraid I’ll shatter. Maybe I will. I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread.
I wait for him to say something, to ask what happened, but he doesn’t. He undresses me piece by piece, systematically. Structured, like he always is.
And I sit there, like a ragdoll, boneless and useless.
Numb.
He crouches to pull off my shoes and socks, but he hesitates. He doesn’t look at me, as if he can’t. He just drags a jagged breath in before his forehead presses to my knees and clutches my thighs like he can stitch himself into my pain.
He stays there for a breath. Then two. Then another. His jaw twitches and he pulls back. It’s not controlled, not gentle. It’s unsteady. Wrong.
He moves deliberately, with purpose, but it costs him. The way he releases that final breath, like it hurts to let it out makes my eyes burn. It’s like this is the real war he’s fighting, not the one outside the door.
He slips my trainers off, then my socks. His fingers linger on my heel before he places my foot back on the cold tile.
There’s nothing else to take off now, just my underwear. He slowly reaches behind me, his eyes never leaving mine as he undoes my bra. I want to sink against him, let him take my weight. My head feels too heavy, and my limbs are lead weights.
He slides the straps down my arms and tosses it onto the floor with the rest of my ruined clothes.
The cold makes my nipples pebble, but he doesn’t look at my breasts. This isn’t about sex or lust. He’s sewing all the torn pieces of me back together in this room.
He helps me to my feet, and I hold his shoulders as he slides my underwear down my legs. Goosebumps pebble along my thighs and arms as he shrugs out of his kutte, hanging it on the back of the door. He bends down to remove his boots, unlacing them both in the same pattern before toeing them off.
I stand in front of him, naked, exposed, but held. He’s not touching me. He’s too focused on stripping down to his skin, but it’s like I can feel his touch oozing out of the walls themselves.
His boxers are the last thing to come off and that body that I know almost as well as my own guides me under the water.
It’s hot, but every drop feels like needle points against my skin. Zane crowds in behind me, his heat at my back, his presence holding up the tattered remains of my sanity.
He reaches around me, grabbing the shower gel that I used only this morning. I turn to face him, the top of my head barely in line with his chin. I feel small, in a way I haven’t for a long time.
She was so pale…
The thought scatters as Zane lifts my arm, turning my hand over.
He looks at the blood staining my skin like it’s mine, like I’m the one haemorrhaging in the shower.
The water hits, turning pink as it swirls down the drain beneath me.
He squirts the shower gel onto my arm and slowly drags his hand down my wrist, over my palm, rubbing circles as if he can scrub the memory of what I saw with his touch alone.
I stand frozen, locked in the horror replaying in my mind while he sluices the trauma away.
He’d scrubbed my skin that night as well. The same scene just years apart, only then it happened to be my blood and Zane’s.
And his.
Back then, he’d scrubbed the shame out of my bones. Now, he’s washing away the fear.
I close my eyes, my tears mixing with the spray pelting my back, and I let him tend to me. He looks like he wants to vomit, or spill blood himself. I don’t know which.
“Firefly… What happened?”
The words get trapped behind my teeth. He doesn’t stop washing me, his hands skimming over my skin so gentle it makes me want to cry more.
“I…”
His lips press against my forehead, like he can stop my thoughts from spiralling just with his mouth.
“Take your time,” he says.
I swallow the stone in the back of my throat. “She was… Her wrists…”
I don’t know why it’s so hard to say. Violence isn’t something I’ve been shielded from, but this feels different. Somehow more horrifying than anything I’ve seen before.
Chloe… She’s young, drowning in her own head and we should’ve helped her. We could’ve… done something. Told her she’s not alone and that…
What?
What do you say to someone who is living with so much pain that dying feels like the only way out?
A sob tears out of me, brutal and pitiful all at once. I cover my face with my now clean hands. I don’t want Zane to see me like this.
His arms wrap around me, pulling me to his chest. I feel his mouth in my hair, then against my temple.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs. “I should never have left.”
I shake my head against him. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Anything that touches you, Makenna, is my fault. I should have protected you better.”
I lift my chin, tipping my head back so I can meet his eyes. He looks broken, like he’s fighting demons I can’t see. “No one knew she was going to… cut herself like that.”
He exhales so hard it makes my chest hurt. “I brought you here to keep you safe, and all this has done is give you new nightmares. Probably brought up a few old ones too.”
I try not to flinch. Neither one of us needs to focus on the past right now. “You can’t shield me from every bad thing in the world, Zane.”
“I can try.”
I press a kiss over where his heart sits, and I swear he doesn’t breathe until I pull back. “All that matters is that you’re here now. Holding me up when I can’t hold myself.”
The water is going cold, but he doesn’t acknowledge it.
His arms tighten around me, like he’s scared to let go in case I float away.
“I’ll always be your crutch when you need me.
” He brushes his mouth to mine, neither one of us caring about the water raining down over us.
“I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you needed me. I keep failing you.”
I take his face between my hands, forcing him to look at me.
“You’re not failing me. Love, relationships, life — it’s not a fairytale, baby.
It’s messy and it’s bloody, and sometimes it leaves you crying in the shower while someone washes you down.
I don’t need perfection from you, Zane. I just need you here, to pick up the pieces when I drop them. ”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment, like he’s filtering those words, reaching for understanding. Then he says, “Then I’ll spend the rest of my life walking behind you and picking up anything you let go of.”
I know he will, because he already does it. I press my cheek to his chest, wrapping my arms around his back.
My life.
My heart.
My husband.