Chapter 40
FOURTY
Iwake with a jolt.
The warmth is gone. So is the sunlight. The laughter. The pancakes. The peace.
And in its place…
Faces. Four of them. Hovering above me.
Lilia. Bea. Kym. Liam.
They’re all staring down at me, eyes wide, expressions drawn tight with concern. It takes me a second to realize where I am, my spine pressing into something soft.
I blink, confused, and push myself upright.
We’re still at the Steele house.
I’m on one of the long couches in the sitting room, I realize. Everything is quiet now. Dim.
Lilia exhales sharply. “Thank god,” she says, her voice cracking with relief.
“What… what happened?” I ask, my voice rough and groggy. My limbs feel heavy, like I’ve been asleep for days.
The group exchanges a look.
Cautious. Guilty.
That’s when I see a bright red path across Liam’s cheek. Angled, raw, and already darkening into a bruise.
My breath hitches. “Oh my god. What happened? Are you okay?”
Kym answers before he can. “Kai happened.”
Her voice is low. Hollow. She looks worse than I’ve ever seen her, paler than usual, her eyes bloodshot. And her hands are tucked into the sleeves of her hoodie, fingers trembling beneath the fabric.
I frown. “What did he do?”
“He knocked you out,” Kym says quietly, arms folded tightly across her chest. “Pressure point. Right at the base of your skull. The vagus nerve. If you press hard enough, the blood flow can slow and make someone lose consciousness.”
My stomach turns.
“But why?” I ask, the memory flashing back in fragments. His hand. The pain. My legs giving out beneath me. “He wouldn’t have done that for no reason. There must have been something—”
I glance between their faces.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Liam sighs, dragging a hand down his face. “Paris and Anderson. They snuck out. Kai found out and drove after them.”
My heart lurches. “But… how? Anderson was half-dead, last I saw him.”
“Paris must have helped,” Bea says, her voice quiet.
I turn to her and Lilia. “So… you know?”
Lilia nods solemnly. “Liam filled us all in. On everything.”
I nod slowly, pressing a hand to my forehead. “Is Kai still gone? He really isn’t in the right state to be driving right now.”
Liam nods again. “That’s why we tried to stop him. That’s how this happened.”
He gestures to the gash on his cheek.
Kai hit him?
“Christian followed him,” Liam adds. “So hopefully he’ll keep us updated.”
I look at him then, really look at him. The swelling around his cheekbone is worse up close, and the look on his face… it’s so defeated. I part my lips. “Liam, are you—”
He cuts me off with a shake of his head. “It’s fine,” he says. “I don’t think he’s exactly… Kai right now.”
I glance down, my fingers twisting in the fabric of the blanket someone must’ve draped over me. “I don’t think he has been for a while,” I say honestly.
No one says anything to that.
When I finally look around, I see Gabriel across the room, pacing near the bay windows, one hand to his ear, the other pressed against the side of his neck. His expression is all tension and panic, his voice a strained whisper into the phone.
“Who’s he talking to?” I ask quietly.
Bea doesn’t look up. “The police. They’re looking for Kai.”
My chest tightens, and the couch spins beneath me.
I blink, willing the panic down, swallowing around the lump clawing up my throat.
What are you trying to do, Kai?
And then Liam’s phone starts to ring.
The shrill sound slices through the tension like a blade, and all of us flinch. He snatches it up, presses it to his ear, and mutters a quick, “Yeah?”
I sit forward, eyes locked on him, every inch of me straining toward the sound of his voice.
Liam’s brows pull together. “Wait, slow down. Where did you say he is now?” Liam stands slowly, one hand gripping the back of the armchair beside him. “He’s stopped?” he repeats, his voice low, wary.
“Yes, but—” he starts, but then stops suddenly. A pause. A sigh. And then he hangs up.
He turns back to us.
Every pair of eyes in the room is on him now.
Waiting.
Liam runs a hand through his hair, dragging his fingers roughly across the back of his neck. “Kai found them,” he says, voice flat. “Christian sent me their location.”
***
The car is silent.
The tense kind of quiet where everyone seems to be holding their breath.
I’m in the backseat, pressed between Bea and Lilia. Kym is in the passenger seat next to Liam, and she hasn’t said a word. Neither has Liam. And for once, they’re not bickering or throwing glances. They’re just… still.
The windows fog slightly from the chill outside, but I barely notice. The seatbelt feels too tight, my chest too heavy. It’s not the car, I know that. It’s something else.
Something in my gut is screaming. Crawling. I can’t explain it, but something is wrong.
Really wrong.
My leg is bouncing before I even realize it, a jittery rhythm pounding through my knee. Lilia notices, and without a word, she reaches across and gently slides her hand over mine. A soft squeeze.
I nod, grateful. But my eyes flick to the front.
Liam hasn’t said a word since the call. But his knuckles are white on the steering wheel, and his jaw keeps flexing like he’s biting something back.
What was it Christian had said again?
He’s stopped. That was the word.
Stopped.
But Kai isn’t the kind of person who stops. He breaks. He burns. But he doesn’t stop.
We take another sharp turn, and I brace myself against the back of the seat, eyes flicking outside again. Rows of houses, more rows of houses, and then something bright cuts through the night.
Smoke.
Fire.
“Holy shit,” Liam says under his breath, and Bea beside me slaps a hand over her mouth.
Wild, angry flames climb into the sky, licking up the side of a building, a house, and painting the smoke orange.
Liam doesn’t bother parking. The car jolts to a halt and we’re all out before the tires stop turning.
The air smells like burning rubber and scorched wood.
And blood.
Because it’s everywhere.
On the airbags of both cars. On the shattered glass. Smeared in dark smudges across metal and concrete. One car is wedged halfway into someone’s porch. The other is crumpled against a mailbox, its engine still steaming.
I can barely move. My legs don’t want to carry me, but I keep going.
Lilia stumbles to a stop beside me. “Oh my god…”
I look to Liam. His face is slack with shock. Pale. I don’t even think he’s blinking.
Then I see Christian, who seems to be in deep conversation with Sterling.
His jacket is half off, his shirt stained with smoke and something darker. His hands are shaking, pushing through his hair again and again.
“Christian!” Liam calls, and we all rush toward him.
Bea reaches him first. “What the hell happened?”
Christian opens his mouth, but no words come. Just a ragged breath. He shakes his head. Rubs his jaw. Swears quietly.
I step forward, my voice cracking. “Where’s Kai?”
Christian hesitates.
Sterling is about to say something, most likely about to tell me what happened. But I don’t listen.
Because I already know.
The hesitation was enough. That one, microscopic moment where he doesn’t answer right away. That’s when my heart drops.
But I don’t need him to say it.
Because behind him, someone is being wheeled out on a stretcher.
***
I can’t see clearly at first, the lights are too bright, the air too full of movement. But then the paramedics turn, just enough for me to catch a glimpse of the face.
Barely a face at all, really. It’s swollen. Bruised. Blood matting dark hair.
But the eyes.
One is nearly swollen shut, but the other is open. And it’s blue. Green.
And gold.
That gold ring in the centre. The one I’ve stared into in every impossible, unbearable moment.
Kai.
My scream gets caught in my throat. I try to run, but Christian grabs me. Holds me back.
“No! Let me go! Let me go!”
“Addie, you can’t—”
“He’s alive! I saw him! Christian, let me go!”
His arms are around me, and I’m thrashing against them, sobbing now, I think. Everything is burning. Everything.
“He’s in critical condition,” Christian finally says, and his voice is broken in a way I’ve never heard.
He doesn’t say the rest.
He doesn’t need to.
Because two black bags are already being zipped up behind him.
Paris.
Anderson.
Gone.
I don’t know how I got to the ground.
One moment, I’m staring at the stretcher. The next, the world is sideways and my knees are buried in wet gravel, my voice tearing out of me in a sound I don’t recognize. I hear its echo bouncing off the burning walls and the cries of strangers, but it doesn’t sound like mine.
Hands try to hold me. Lilia’s. Kym’s. I think Bea, too. But I’m thrashing against them now, wild and desperate, because all I can see are his eyes.
They push him into the ambulance, and I scream his name so hard it rips through my throat like glass. But it doesn’t reach him. It doesn’t reach anything.
Because he’s not moving.
Because he might never move again.
Christian’s arms are around me again. “He’s still breathing,” he says, over and over into my hair.
But I don’t care about breath. I care about the boy. The boy who held fire in his hands and didn’t know how to let go of it. The boy who never got to be anything else.
He was trying.
God, he was trying.
I bury my face in my hands, choking on every breath. All the sound is fire and sirens and a heart breaking loud enough to rattle the earth.
Somewhere in the chaos, the ambulance drives away.
And Kai goes with it.
They take him from the wreckage, but something in me stays behind, still burning.
Kai
In the silence that followed
The world melts into an impossible green, and as it spreads through every corner of me. I can’t tell if I’m vanishing into madness, or if madness has always been that colour.
In that green I find a doorway, and when I cross the threshold, the world I had known flips soundlessly shut.
But it’s only when the heaviness from my back slips away that I finally understand. I’m walking for the first time.
Addie