Chapter 51
Dancing With the End
THE REQUIEM | Present
Ican’t tell where the storm ends, and my own pulse begins.
Everything is too loud, too bright, clicking violently into place beneath my skin.
The lavender fog is gone, incinerated the exact microsecond the dagger sank into his side.
In its place is a roaring wildfire of memories.
I remember the white walls. I remember the leather restraints biting into my wrists while my Mother watched with that serene, devastating smile. I remember the dead son we almost had.
And I remember him.
“Pressure! Keep the pressure on the lateral wound!”
We are out of the alley, extracted by a man with a buzz cut. I don’t know him, but he pulls Zagreus, who refuses to let go of my hand even unconscious.
I am sitting on a steel stool beside the hospital bed, frozen but vibrating at a frequency born of pure terror.
My hands are resting on my lap, palms upturned.
They look like a macabre canvas. The blood has dried, venous crimson from the Mother I just shot, mixed with the blood of the husband whom I betrayed. I do not deserve him.
“Signora Vitale, you need to step outside. We need to establish a central line, and the field is compromised.” A doctor reaches for my arm.
“Don’t.”
I don’t look at the doctor. My gaze is welded to Zagreus, who’s drifting in and out of consciousness. He is flat on his back; the white sheets beneath him are already drinking the deep red blooming from his shoulder and his side.
The terrifying relief of finding each other again.
I don’t move. If I step away from this bed, the horizon will collapse again.
I dismantle myself piece by piece just to keep from screaming.
I compartmentalize the grief of the child we lost, the fury at the forgery I’ve been living in, and the sheer, agonizing weight of his sacrifice.
He knew. He knew my mind was a sieve. He knew his own blood was the only trigger violent enough to shatter the memory block Hannah had built inside me.
I reach out, my trembling, blood-crusted fingers wrapping around his uninjured hand. His skin is burning hot against my ice-cold palms, anchoring me to the earth.
Breathe. Just watch his chest rise.
Minutes dissolve into hours. The doctors work around me, and when the bleeding stops, they leave us in heavy silence I fill with my breathless gasps.
I lean forward, burying my face against the edge of the mattress, my forehead nearly touching his hip.
The hollow inside me aches like a terminal sickness carved into my ribs.
I don’t need answers right now. I don’t need to discuss the massacre, or the lies, or the ghosts that Hannah populated my head with. I just need him to breathe.
I refuse to let them bandage my wounds until I know he’s alive and breathing.
A shift in the room’s gravity makes my eyes snap open.
The heart monitor’s rhythm spikes, a frantic visual pulse. I lift my head. Zagreus’s thick, dark eyelashes flutter against his pale cheekbones. His jaw locks, and a muscle ticks beneath the scar on his face. The scar I gave him. I swallow.
Before his eyes even open, his hand twitches in mine and his fingers flex.
He lunges upward against the pillows with a strangled gasp, his chest heaving as his stormy grey eyes scan the empty space of the room.
He isn’t looking at the monitors or the IV lines.
He is searching for a ghost. He’s searching for me.
His dilated pupils are black, blind with a panic I have never seen on him.
“Selene—”
My name leaves his lips, raw with the terror that I was just another ghost born of his blood loss. His free hand wildly reaches out into the empty air, searching, clawing for a sanity he thinks he ruined.
“I’m here,” I whisper.
I lunge forward, catching his reaching hand with both of mine, pressing his palm flat against my cheek. I slide my fingers up to the back of his neck, pulling myself into his orbit until my forehead crashes against his.
Zagreus freezes. His fingers dig into my jaw, into my hair, his rough thumb tracking the damp, salt-stained skin of my cheek.
He inhales sharply, his chest crashing hard against my breasts, holding me so tightly against his heavy heartbeat that the stitches in his side pull. He drinks in the scent of me.
He doesn’t speak or ask if I remember.
His eyes lock onto mine. He just stares into my soul, verifying the fracture, checking the dilation of my pupils until he sees the recognition shining through my tears. He sees the firecracker he branded.
A broken exhale escapes his lips, his broad shoulders shaking violently against mine as he buries his face into the crook of my neck. His grip on my waist is a vice, an eternal claim that overrides every rule of this world we built and destroyed together.
I close my eyes, tangling my fingers into the dark, damp waves at the nape of his neck, holding him back with the same desperate, mutual madness.
The trauma can wait. The reckoning can wait.
Right now, there are only the two fractured pieces of a violent universe finally breathing the exact same air.
And for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, neither of us let go.
Not even an inch. Because after everything we’ve survived—the lies, the blood, the graves, the ghosts. Being together feels less like love, and more like coming home.