Chapter 35
The engine roared like something possessed.
It wasn't just machine noise. It was an animal trapped inside sheet metal, slamming its head against the walls to break free.
The armored van sliced through the expressway under a fine November rain.
The tires whined on the wet asphalt in a constant screech, and up front the windshield wipers beat a frantic rhythm—thump-thump, thump-thump—like a heart ripped from a chest, trying to remind the body to keep going.
I wasn't sitting. I couldn't. I was kneeling on the corrugated steel floor of the cargo area, back against the divider, legs spread to absorb every jolt.
The cold metal seeped through my pants into my knees—a cold I almost welcomed because it kept me awake.
The smell inside the van was a sealed-in hell: hot diesel, wet rubber, fresh gunpowder, fresh blood leaving a metallic taste in the air.
The engine's vibration traveled up through my sacrum, my sternum, as if the whole van was trying to shake me out of a nightmare that hadn't ended yet.
Solaia was in my lap.
Her whole body fit against mine as if I were the only thing keeping her from dissolving.
Her head nestled in the hollow of my neck, spine curved against my chest, legs tucked in.
I was holding her too tight. I knew it and couldn't stop.
My arms locked around her ribs, forearm under her knees, palm spread across the back of her neck, fingers buried in hair matted with dried blood and soot.
Her scent was still there, despite everything.
Burnt vanilla, fear, cold sweat. Mixed with the gunpowder.
Mixed with the diesel. Mixed with the acrid tang of blood that wasn't just hers.
The back of my tactical shirt was soaked with Ivanov's blood—a hot spray that had clung to my skin when the exit wound cracked his skull open like a ripe watermelon.
I felt the fabric stick and pull with every breath.
She was trembling.
It wasn't the cold. It wasn't the van's temperature. It was her body shutting down after a chemical marathon of adrenaline, cortisol, absolute terror. Her nervous system trying to find somewhere to land after falling from the sky.
Her teeth chattered. Clac-clac-clac-clac. A dry, childlike sound. A sound I had no right to hear coming from her.
I pressed my lips to her forehead, felt the skin damp with sweat and rain that had gotten in when I pulled her from their van, and forced my voice into existence.
“Look at me, Sol.”
The order came out hoarse, smoke still trapped in my lungs, the echo of gunshots still ringing in my ears.
“Eyes on me. Now.”
Her lashes trembled. Her pupils were dilated, black, swallowing the warm brown I knew by heart.
She tried to focus. I watched the attempt like a physical struggle—the small furrow of her brow, her mouth opening a fraction.
She failed. Her eyes wandered over my cut cheek, over the dried blood on my collar, but didn't really see me.
The distance inside her was a place no weapon could reach.
I ran my thumb across her forehead, pushing away the strands stuck there. My hand trembled, and it filled me with a childish anger at myself. I'd just put thirty-seven bullets in thirty-seven targets without missing one, and I couldn't control a tiny tremor in a caress.
The van made a sharp left turn. Her body slid in my lap. A low, guttural moan escaped her throat. The sound of a wounded animal—a sound that should never come from Solaia Varro.
My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit.
“Where does it hurt?”
The question came out too fast, panic rising like bile.
“Talk to me, amore. Where?”
She didn't answer with words. Her body answered first.
Her right hand rose slowly, as if pushing through thick water. Her fingers brushed my shirt, grabbed the soaked fabric like a lifeline. I saw the faint strength in that grip, the desperate need to hold onto something real.
That's when I saw it.
The sleeve of her gray cardigan had ridden up when the van turned.
Her wrists.
God.
The skin was raw. Zip ties had sawed deep, leaving purple, swollen, bloody grooves. In places the skin was simply gone, torn away, revealing the wet white of tendon. Her nails—two broken to the quick. Dried blood under the others. She'd clawed at walls, floors, maybe faces.
She fought.
While I burned Chicago looking for her, she fought with what she had, with what was left.
I held her wrist with a gentleness I didn't know I had in me. My enormous hands covered the marks. The contrast hit me like a bullet to the chest: my hands dirty with death, her skin destroyed from trying to live.
A sound escaped my mouth without permission.
“I did this.”
The guilt hit my stomach first, acid that corroded, then rose to my throat like vomit.
“I let it happen.”
Her eyes focused for a second. Just one. It was enough.
“Cassian…” Her voice was a thread of air snagged on a thorn. “Is it over?”
The word “over” came out like a child asking if the nightmare had ended.
I pressed her body against mine until I felt her heartbeat against my chest. Fast, weak, but beating.
“It's over.”
I said it like a truth that needed to exist.
“All dead. Ivanov dead. Kovacs dead. The warehouse in flames. No one touches you again. Ever.”
I felt the words settle between us like a blanket. I needed her to believe, even though I still had blood under my nails.
She nodded. An almost imperceptible movement. Her head fell against my shoulder. Something warm trickled down my collarbone. My body went rigid.
I pulled her back an inch and saw.
The cut on her neck.
Ivanov’s blade had drawn a thin line just above her collarbone. Fresh blood still seeped, slow and stubborn. He’d been playing. Marking. Torturing—like leaving a message written in flesh.
I tore open the gauze pack with my teeth. The plastic snapped. The smell of antiseptic exploded in the confined air. I pressed it against the cut.
“It’s going to sting.”
My voice tried to be calm. My hand wasn’t.
She didn’t even blink. Her silence was worse than a scream. Not because I wanted to hear pain. Because I wanted to hear Solaia. Solaia was never quiet. Solaia was color, noise, life exploding.
Seeing her like this—gray, wilted, extinguished—was like watching the sun die in the middle of the afternoon.
City lights passed in red and orange blurs through the rear windows. Each traffic light was a stab of brightness in the dark. The radio in the cab murmured to the driver—codes, streets, estimated time. All I heard was the sound of her teeth chattering when she couldn’t control it.
I looked at her face under the van’s pale light.
Dirt on her left cheek, a distinct handprint. Split lower lip, swollen, purple. Her right eye already starting to swell shut. A bruise on her temple where they’d pistol-whipped her. I recognized each mark the way you recognize words written in the language of hatred.
The rage I thought was spent came back, black and absolute. If I breathed too deep, I’d go back in time just to kill more slowly.
“I thought you were dead.”
The confession tore out of me, unarmored. It wasn’t my decision to say it. It was a spasm.
“When I saw the room… the blood on the wall… the empty Sig… I died there, Sol. Died and came back just to get you.”
I heard my own voice as if it belonged to someone else. I’d never heard myself like this. The adrenaline from the hunt had faded, and in its place was this: a hole.
Her hand rose slowly, heavy with sedative and exhaustion. She touched my face. Cold fingers, trembling, crusted with dried blood. She brushed the cut on my cheek as if trying to anchor me to the present.
“You came,” she whispered.
That was all that mattered to her. Not the warehouse, not the dead, not the hell. Just me, there.
I kissed her wounded palm. Tasted blood, dirt, salt. My own taste mixed in. I wanted to kiss it all away if I could.
“I would have burned the planet.”
I said against her skin.
“Every city. Every soul. If it brought you back.”
She smiled.
Weak, crooked from the swelling. But she smiled. A piece of her rose up just to give me that, and I came undone inside.
“My monster,” she murmured.
The word held affection and wound together.
I pressed my forehead to hers, breathed in what remained of her scent—the one that was only hers.
“Yours,” I confirmed.
My voice broke in a place I don’t let anyone touch.
“Only yours. Always yours.”
I needed her to see. Not the words. The whole truth behind them.
“I love you.”
The words came out raw, unvarnished, as if they’d been trapped in my throat for a lifetime. I couldn’t remember saying that to anyone. Not to my dead. Not to myself.
“I love you in a way that destroys me, Solaia.”
I felt my chest crack as I spoke.
“More than my life. More than anything. I love you so much it terrifies me.”
Tears welled in her eyes and rolled slowly, carving trails through the dirt. Her brightness was too delicate for this world, and yet there it was.
“Cassian…”
She tried to say more. I didn’t let her. Not because I didn’t want to hear, but because I didn’t know if I could take it.
“Don’t talk. Just stay.”
I cupped the back of her neck gently. My lips touched her temple as if I could leave a part of myself behind—something to fill the space where they’d tried to take from her.
Her smile faltered. Her eyelids grew heavy. Her head went slack against my chest.
“I’m so tired, Caz…”
Her voice was the sigh of an old child.
A chill ran down my spine.
“Don’t sleep.”
The order came out hard. I didn’t want hardness. I just wanted her.
I shook her gently—just enough not to hurt.
“Sol, eyes open. We’re almost there.”
“Just a little bit…”
Her eyes closed.
Her body went completely limp.
My throat clenched shut with silent force.
“SOLAIA!”
No reaction. Her full weight collapsed against me.
I pressed two fingers to her carotid, searching for life the way you search for air. Pulse fast, weak, thready. Still there. Still hers. I held my breath as if that might help.
“DRIVER!”
I pounded on the partition with my fist. The metal vibrated.
“NOW!”
“Pulling in!”
The van braked in a controlled skid. The sound of tires on asphalt stretched into a long scream. Rear doors flew open. White light, blinding, assaulted my eyes. The chemical smell of hospital cut through like a blade—cold, clean, almost unreal after the basement.
Team waiting. Lab coats. Masks. Metal gurney. Family doctors. I registered it all in a quick, blurred snapshot. Only her body mattered.
I laid Solaia on the gurney with the care of placing something sacred. My hands didn't want to let go. My fingers lingered a fraction too long on the fabric of her cardigan. I didn't want to lose the weight of her.
They cut away her clothes with quick snips.
I heard the sound of fabric giving way, that dry rip, and felt my rage ignite again.
They slid in a needle. Connected an IV. An O? mask covered her face.
The plastic settled against her nose like something too cold.
The beep of the monitor filled the air—the only relief.
I followed.
A nurse tried to stop me with an outstretched arm.
“Sir, please—”
I looked at her.
It wasn't a conscious threat. It was what I was in that moment. She backed away before finishing the sentence.
I ran alongside the gurney, holding her limp hand. Cold fingers. A delicate jewel beneath dried blood. I rubbed my thumb across her palm, trying to keep her present with that small gesture.
The double doors of the trauma room loomed ahead, white, with a narrow window at the top.
“You can't go past here,” said a gray-haired doctor.
His voice carried authority, and I recognized authority as enemy by reflex.
I still tried to advance. He placed a firm hand on my chest. I didn't need force to realize this wasn't a place for force.
My hand released hers without wanting to let go.
Her fingers slipped from mine. The emptiness that remained was physical.
The doors closed between us.
The sound of them closing was the loudest I'd ever heard.
White corridor. Fluorescent light buzzing. Smell of ether and chlorine. People running back and forth, hurried footsteps I couldn't follow with my eyes. Everything seemed to happen behind thick glass.
I leaned against the wall.
Slid slowly to the floor.
My knees hit the cold tile and I felt no pain. I felt nothing beyond a kind of earthquake starting in the center of my chest. Not trembling in my hands. Trembling in my sternum. A tremor that threatened to crack my bones.
I had already killed everyone. I had already burned the warehouse. I had already done the impossible.
And I was out here.
Useless.
Armed to the teeth.
Completely useless.
I covered my face with my hands. Felt the dried blood catch against my skin, keeping my fingers from sliding. The metallic taste returned to my mouth like punishment.
“Don't you dare,” I whispered to the cold floor.
My voice came out cracked, almost soundless.
“Don't you dare leave me now, Solaia. Not after making me feel this.”
I closed my eyes.
And waited.
For the first time in my life, I prayed.