Chapter Thirty-Two #4
I put two fingers against her throat, feeling for a pulse. She’s not dead, I can see her chest rising and falling.
But unconscious.
I stand on shaky legs, my entire body trembling and screaming in pain.
Two bodies lay in my kitchen now.
Masen… dead.
Fiona unconscious.
Both of them tried to kill my baby.
I know I should feel something—anything—for what I just did but I don’t.
Looking around at this house, this place was built on corruption, lies and the blood of others.
This fucking mansion wasn’t built from an honest dollar.
Steven Kellar built his empire on the backs of innocent people.
Their blood paid for the life we led and I didn’t even know it.
I was raised to believe that the town across the tracks was where evil was bred and lived.
Somerset was made out to be one of the greatest places in the country, everyone here walking around with an air of purity and looking down their noses at anyone who doesn’t match their wealth.
I expected the worst of the people from Stormsend, until I went to SU.
Each of them had a right to hate me after everything they thought I did, but some showed kindness when they didn’t need to.
I was too fucking naive to see that my father was the worst monster and my own brother was a pathological liar. They both tried to use me for their own gain, sheltered me and molded me into the image they wanted, only to throw me away when their plans changed. I became expendable.
I have no one left.
Nothing left to give.
Everything about me and my life is a lie.
I’m all out of fairy dust.
I place a hand on my small bump and make a silent vow to my unborn child.
You will never not matter.
I’m sorry I wasn’t what you needed me to be.
I know what I need to do.
I know how to end this once and for all.
Once I do this, I’ll dismantle the cartel. There will never be a war. Xaden will have no one to fight, Fiona will rot in this crypt of a mansion like she fucking deserves.
I walk to the study and find Dad's expensive lighter.
Then I move through the house systematically.
Opening gas lines.
Turning on stoves without lighting them.
Gathering papers near heat sources.
I'm calm about it.
Methodical.
When I'm done, I drag Fiona's unconscious body into the living room, away from the immediate blast zone but still trapped. She weighs more than she looks, I look down and sneer at the bitch.
Let her burn if the fire takes her.
Let her wake up surrounded by flames.
She deserves a preview of hell before she finally gets there.
Then I return to the kitchen.
To Masen's body.
I sink down beside him, my back against the cabinet.
The hiss of gas fills the air.
I should leave.
Should run.
But I don't want to.
I'm so tired.
So tired of fighting.
So tired of everyone hurting me.
My hand goes to my stomach.
“I'm sorry,” I whisper to the baby. “He wanted to kill you to hurt your father. And she wanted to kill you to hurt everyone. I couldn't let them. But now... now I just want it all to stop.”
The lighter sits heavy in my hand.
One flick and it's over.
I close my eyes.
Take a breath of gas-laden air.
And flick the lighter.
The fire moves faster than I expected.
I have never set fire to anything before tonight and I didn't know that it would be beautiful.
That is the word that arrives and I hate it and it is true, the way the accelerant trails ignite in sequence, one catching and passing it to the next, a chain of small decisions becoming one large unstoppable thing.
The kitchen is illuminated in a second. The walls go orange and then the cabinets catch and the light turns to something rich and unsteady and I sit against the island and watch it spread with my arms around my stomach and my knees pulled in as close as they'll go.
The heat arrives quickly. It should hurt more than it does.
I think my body understands what I have decided and has made some agreement with the situation, not fighting, not fleeing, just settling.
There is a quality to the air that is already changing, the oxygen thinning, replacing itself with something thick and wrong, and I know from the reading I did at Walter House, the months of consuming everything the library had because it was the only place they couldn't touch me, that the smoke will come for me before the flames do.
That this is how it works. That the body goes quiet before it goes still.
Good.
Quiet sounds like something I have been chasing for a very long time.
I look at Masen.
The fire is moving toward him. The glow is catching the blood on the floor and turning it colors it shouldn't be.
I watch the light move across his face, that still, younger-looking face, and I think about my mother.
About the fact that she died in this house too.
Not in this kitchen, not by fire, but in a room two floors above me, by a man who is already gone.
I think about growing up in a place that was always a ruin waiting to happen, a house built on corruption and violence and the slow grinding certainty that love was conditional and could be withdrawn the moment it cost something.
I chose differently.
That lands with a clarity that surprises me, that through all of it, through every terrible decision and every compromise and every moment I stood in the wrong room with the wrong people, I chose love.
I chose it stubbornly, stupidly, past all reason.
I chose it for Kenna, for Harper, for Carnage, who has stood by my side.
I chose it for a man who couldn't say it back and chose me anyway in every way that wasn't words.
The smoke is thickening.
My lungs are starting to notice.
I tip my head back against the cabinet door and stare at the ceiling through the haze and think about the baby.
This is the thing that has been sitting at the back of everything tonight, the thing I have been making decisions around without fully acknowledging it.
Every choice I made in this kitchen was the choice of a woman protecting something.
Every swing of the skillet. Every shot I fired.
Every second I spent clawing at Fiona on the floor.
I protected this baby.
And now I'm sitting in a burning building.
The thought arrives so sharp it almost cuts through the smoke-drowsiness settling into my limbs.
What am I doing?
I look down at my stomach. At the small swell that is harder to ignore with every week that passes.
At the life that exists inside me without asking for any of this, that had no vote in the war I was born into, no say in the family that created it, no choice about arriving at this particular intersection of violence and grief and desperate, complicated love.
This baby chose me.
The thought is irrational. Babies don't choose.
I know that. But it arrives with the full weight of something true and I hold it, as the heat presses closer and the smoke burns at the back of my throat and I think…
I survived Walter House. I survived Xaden's warehouse.
I survived Masen's gun and Fiona's bullets and the worst year of my life and I survived every single thing this family, this war and this world threw at me.
Now I am sitting on the floor of a burning building because I am tired.
I am so tired.
But the baby is not tired.
The baby is only beginning.
I try to stand.
My legs are slower than they should be, the smoke already doing its work, the world going slightly soft at the edges.
I get one knee under me and push and the effort is enormous in a way that tells me I have less time than I thought.
The ceiling above me is black with it now, the smoke pooling and descending, and I understand with the specific clarity of a person who has run out of time to be vague about things—I made a mistake.
I made a mistake.
Get up!
I press both hands flat to the floor.
Get up, Toren.
I try.
The world tilts.
My arms buckle and I go down and the marble is hot now under my palms, warm in a way the floor should never be warm, and the last coherent thought I have before the edges go dark is not about Xaden and not about the war and not even about Masen's face in the firelight.
It's about a baby the size of a peach.
Still here.
Still mine.
I'm sorry.