Chapter 16
June
Nothing much happened in Kai’s apartment—now dubbed the rescue base. A name far too grand for what it really was: a quiet, dimly lit space filled with restless bodies and unanswered questions. A place where even the furniture felt like it was waiting.
Hours crawled by, thick and heavy, each one pressing down on me until the air itself felt weighted—dense with tension, fear, and the exhaustion no one dared admit.
Each sound echoed too loudly: footsteps in the hall, the rustle of jackets, the low murmur of voices that rarely lasted more than a sentence.
I wanted to be out there—doing anything that felt like action.
Even running into danger seemed like a relief, better than pacing in circles inside my own mind.
But Lincoln kept reminding me of the risk. Of what could happen if I was seen. If they saw me.
“Think about Kai,” he’d said, more than once.
So I did.
And, God, it was torture.
The best thing I could do for him… was nothing.
Just sit. Just hold still.
Wait.
Be a sitting duck, while the people who actually had power did the real work.
My hands jumped whenever someone walked through the entrance.
Every time, a flicker of hope sparked inside me—maybe this would be the update, the breakthrough, the miracle. Maybe they’d found a shred of information, a trail, a rumor, anything.
But no.
Each person returned with the same tight expression, the same subtle shake of the head. Empty-handed. Defeated.
And the stillness swallowed me whole all over again.
No one really talked to ech other anymore.
The conversations had dwindled down to necessity—strategy, updates, logistics. Anything else felt like a betrayal, like pretending this wasn’t life or death.
Even Lincoln and I had run out of things to say.
We sat across from each other, sharing stale air and even more stale silence. Words hovered between us sometimes, unspoken or half-formed, things we maybe should’ve said days ago. But every time they reached the surface, the moment broke, and the silence returned.
Still, the quiet gnawed at me.
Not just irritating—suspicious.
Lincoln barely looked at me.
Every time, his eyes slid away, a knot twisted inside me.
“Is there anything you’re not telling me?” I finally asked, unable to take it anymore.
“No.”
Just no. Pared down, clipped. He didn’t even lift his gaze from the map he’d been pretending to study for the past twenty minutes.
“I don’t need protecting,” I insisted. “Not anymore. You can tell me anything, Link.”
“June.” He exhaled—frustrated, strained, the kind of sigh that said he was seconds away from cracking. “I stopped treating you like a child years ago. When are you going to realize that? You need to grow up one day.”
It hit like a punch—sharp and low, stealing the air from my lungs.
Grow up?
Grow up?
That wasn’t fair.
He knew it wasn’t fair.
I stared at him, stunned—not by volume, but by accuracy. His words dug straight into the softest part of me, the part I tried hard to pretend didn’t exist.
I wanted to snap back, to tell him he had no idea what I’d survived, what I’d endured, what I’d been forced to become. I wanted to throw my pain in his face—make him see the scars he’d just prodded.
But when I caught the expression in his eyes, I froze.
The quiet disappointment in them gutted me.
And somehow, that hurt worse.
The look in his eyes made it clear.
“I’m not a child,” I whispered, hating how small my voice sounded.
“I know.” His tone softened, but not enough. An edge still clung to it. “Then quit acting like one. Quit waiting for something else to tell you what to do.”
The words stung because there was truth buried deep inside them.
Truth I didn’t want to face.
I’d been lingering in limbo.
For orders. For signs. For someone to swoop in and make the universe make sense again. And maybe that made me foolish. Or scared. Or human.
But I couldn’t admit that right now.
Not to him.
Not when everything inside me already seemed on the verge of coming apart.
So instead, I turned away, muttering, “You don’t get to talk to me like that.”
Lincoln paused long enough for the air between us to thin and stretch.
Then he murmured, quieter, “Then don’t put me in situations where I feel forced to.”
That was it.
The last straw.
A fucking joke.
All of it.
They wanted me to stay hidden, stay quiet, stay out of sight—then Lincoln turned around and accused me of “waiting for someone to tell me what to do.”
What the hell did he expect?
That I’d put on a cape and go storm the Li family home myself?
I swallowed the retort, burning the back of my throat and chose the more dramatic, petty option: I stormed off.
The guest room door slammed behind me—loud, sharp, cathartic—louder than I meant it to be.
Lincoln had slept in this room before I arrived. Just another reminder that this entire space carried someone else’s presence. Someone else’s scent. Someone else’s memories.
Never Kai’s.
And I loathed that.
Loathed walking past his closed bedroom.
Loathed imagining what his sheets smelled like, what state his pillows were in.
Loathed that Lincoln would never let me sleep in there.
“It’s not appropriate,” he’d said.
“It’ll mess with your head.”
Too late for that.
Way too late.
The truth was, I wanted to be surrounded by anything that carried even the faintest trace of him.
The lingering warmth of his scent.
His belongings—anything that made him real in this space.
Any shred of proof that Kai wasn’t a dream I’d made up to survive the last few days. That he was still real—out there somewhere breathing the same air as me.
But instead, I was trapped here, in this room that smelled like stale air and someone else’s aftershave. A room that pressed too close and too quiet, pushing me into pacing like a trapped animal while the people downstairs whispered plans I wasn’t allowed to be part of.
I sat on the edge of the bed and dug my palms into my knees until they tingled.
Forcing air into my lungs.
Forcing thoughts to line up instead of spinning.
Grow up, Lincoln said.
Right.
Maybe growing up meant learning how to sit in the dark with nothing but your fear for warmth while the people you love fought your war without you.
Maybe maturity was just the ability to sit still while your heart broke in slow motion.
I wasn’t convinced. Not even close.
A soft knock.
Barely a tap.
Then the hinges groaned open.
“Kai?”
His name slipped out of me.
And then he stepped inside.
Alive.
Whole.
Beautiful in that devastating way only he could be.
For a second, as if time froze, the air suspended in anticipation, like the world held its position until he stepped through.
I didn’t even have time to stand before he was already in motion—crossing the room in long, urgent strides, like he’d been running just to get to me. He dragged me into his hold.
Not gentle.
Not cautious.
Hungry.
His arms wrapped around me, strong and desperate, and I melted into him without thinking. My hands clutched his shirt, my forehead resting against the warm curve of his neck. The familiar mix of faint soap, smoke, and raw warmth engulfed me.
I drew him in like I’d been starved of oxygen, like I’d been suffocating without realizing it.
I didn’t want to release even a single breath.
Afraid that if I let go, if I even blinked, he’d slip through my fingers like a hallucination.
But something was wrong.
His skin carried a coldness that didn’t belong here.
His breaths came rough and uneven.
His entire frame tightened beneath my touch.
And then I caught it.
The rough edges of a bandage under my fingertips.
The faint tackiness of dried blood near his temple.
A flinch he couldn’t hide when my thumb skimmed too close.
“Kai,” I breathed, pulling back just enough to see him.
My heart dropped.
Red seeped through the white gauze at his temple—fresh, bright. A deep bruise had begun to bloom along his jaw, a dark shadow ruining the sharp lines I used to trace with my fingers in the early hours of the morning.
“You’re hurt.” My voice broke, painfully soft. “Kai… you’re hurt.”
He tried to smile—tried to give me that maddening, reassuring, everything’s fine curve of his lips.
But it faltered halfway.
A grimace shadowed his features before he dropped his gaze away, like he couldn’t stand to let me see all of it.
As if the truth beneath it all was far more brutal than the visible wounds.
And suddenly, I felt it too—the ache in my ribs, the sting along my cheekbone, the throbbing behind my eyes.
Like my body had decided to mirror the agony etched into him, to carry it with him, for him, because he was standing there battered and bruised and trying too hard to pretend he was fine.
It rippled through me. A hot, sharp wave tore through me, blurring the lines between his pain and my own. Until I wasn’t even sure where his hurt ended and mine began.
I clung to him harder, nails curling into the fabric of his shirt, desperate to anchor him to me, gripping him like he might vanish.
Then—
The entry exploded open.
A violent rush of sound and motion crashed into the room. Figures stormed in—shadows blurring into faces I couldn’t recognize, shouting words that felt too far away to understand. Hands seized Kai, dragging him backward, tearing him out of my arms.
“No! Stop!”
The scream tore from my throat raw, feral.
I lunged after him, my fingers caught the edge of his sleeve for a split second before he was dragged out of reach.
Dannie appeared in the chaos, suddenly there, as if conjured from the air—his expression panicked, wide-eyed and frantic as they darted between me and Kai. His mouth moved fast—urgent, desperate—but the sound was distorted, muffled, like we were trapped at the bottom of a swimming pool.
I couldn’t make out a single syllable.
I lunged toward him too—both of them—but the room was dissolving into static and smoke, the floor tilting, air snagging in my throat.
Then, in perfect, terrible unison, both Kai and Dannie both moved, hands sliding behind their backs.
Two metallic clicks snapped through the air like bones breaking.
They turned toward me.
Their gaze—empty. Vacant. Hollow.