Chapter 14 #3
Not startled in the ordinary way. Not caught off guard by inconvenience, irritation, or a problem requiring quick correction.
Shock moved through him like a crack across glass, splintering that careful stillness from the inside.
His gaze widened by only a fraction, but on Tobias, that fraction was devastating.
It stripped something from him. Control, maybe.
Certainty. The seamless, polished surface he wore between himself and the rest of the world.
Then the shock changed.
I watched as it deepened into something darker, heavier, almost impossible to look at.
Despair.
The word arrived before I wanted it to, before I could stop myself from naming the thing in his expression.
He looked at me like he had lost something before he’d even had the chance to reach for it.
Like the entire future had just collapsed into a single, brutal point, and he understood, with absolute clarity, that nothing after this moment could remain the same.
I couldn’t look away.
His gaze trapped mine, raw in a way I had never seen from him before. It felt worse than if he had been emotionless. Worse than if he had looked guilty. Because beneath the shock and despair, something else was already forming.
Calculation.
Not because he didn’t feel.
Because he did.
Because whatever he felt when he looked at me was so enormous that it had immediately begun turning itself into decisions.
I wanted to move.
I wanted to scream.
“Tobias?” I whispered desperately, my voice barely more than air.
His name came out like a question, but I didn’t know what I was asking.
Tell me this isn’t what it looks like.
Tell me he fell.
Tell me you found him.
Tell me there’s an explanation.
Tobias released the man’s leg and took one step down from the platform.
Ben swore, catching more of the weight as the man’s shoulder struck the platform with a wet, sickening sound.
“Cove,” Tobias croaked.
“What…” I tried, but the words broke apart before they became a sentence.
Tobias took another step down the stairs leading to the top of the tank.
I took one back.
His gaze flicked to my movement.
“I left my phone,” I whispered.
The absurdity of it hit me at the same time as the horror.
My phone.
I had come back for my phone.
I had borrowed Mrs. Alvaro’s, paid for an overpriced rideshare, badge-scanned through two gates, let the driver leave, walked through Tobias’s quiet house, all because I had wanted my stupid phone before morning.
And now there was a man half-draped across the edge of the box jelly tank.
“Cove,” he said again, my name sounding broken and rough, like it was clawing up from his chest.
“What did you do?” I asked quietly, silently pleading for him to talk his way out of this, needing him to.
He didn’t respond, though, and I felt something shatter inside of me.
“Tobias,” Ben warned, still holding the upper body of the dead man.
Was it a warning?
Or a plea?
I didn’t know.
Tobias did not look away from me.
“I need you to stay calm,” he implored, taking another step down, then another, and another.
That was the wrong thing to say.
It was the worst thing to say.
Because those words meant there was something not to be calm about.
The fear hit all at once, so sharp and total that for a moment I couldn’t see.
As I tried to blindly back up, the sole of my shoe slid out from under me on the damp floor. I fell from the loss of balance, crashing down on my butt.
Pain shot up my spine, but it barely registered beneath the terror already flooding my system.
I tried to push myself back up, but my hand slipped. The floor was wet from the tank, slick beneath my palm, and the moment my fingers skidded through the thin layer of water, something animal inside me, something instinctual, reared up.
I scrambled backward, heels dragging against the floor, one hand braced behind me as I tried to move away from him.
Away from the tank.
Away from the body.
Away from Tobias.
The thought of that—of needing distance from Tobias—hurt so intensely I almost couldn’t breathe around it.
He stopped halfway down the steps.
His gloved hand tightened around the railing, water still dripping from his wrist and striking the metal step below in slow, precise taps.
“Cove,” he said, softer now. “Please.”
I shook my head, still scooting back.
“No.” The word broke when it left me.
Tobias flinched.
It was small, but I saw it. I saw the way his mouth tightened, the way his eyes flicked over my face as if trying to calculate which part of him had frightened me most and finding too many answers to isolate one.
He came down another step.
I moved back again, faster this time, my shoulder hitting the curve of a tank stand hard enough to send a dull ache through my arm.
“Don’t,” I said.
Tobias stopped.
Quietly, he promised, “I won’t hurt you.”
I wanted to believe him.
God, I wanted to believe him so badly it made me nauseous.
But there was a dead man behind him.
There was a dead man, and Tobias had not denied it. He hadn’t explained. He had only told me to stay calm, as if calm could be commanded into existence when the world had just split fucking open.
“You killed him,” I whispered.
Tobias’s face went still in a different way.
Not blank.
Worse.
Accepting.