Chapter Thirty-Three Khai
Chapter Thirty-Three
Khai
“I love you.”
The words leave her like a final prayer, thin, breathless, as if she’s already halfway gone and this is all she has left to anchor herself to the world.
They hit me square in the chest.
Not like comfort. Like a bullet.
My eyes snap back to her. To the tears carving tracks down her face. To the tremor in her body as she fights to stay upright in my father’s hold. And something inside me breaks in a way I can’t repair, because I know, I know, this ends with blood.
One of us won’t walk out of here.
My father laughs.
It’s quiet at first, almost amused, like he’s witnessing something entertaining instead of a life being held hostage. The barrel presses back into her temple, firm, possessive, and she flinches, a small, helpless sound caught in her throat.
I want to be there.
I want my hands on her face, wiping her tears, promising her she’s safe.
But it would be a lie.
And my father would enjoy the lie more than the truth.
“This is perfect,” he murmurs, and the satisfaction in his voice makes my skin crawl. “Tell me, Khai… why would I kill you now?”
He pauses, savouring it, letting the room hold its breath.
“You’ve been forged into exactly what I needed.” His voice turns almost conversational. “A weapon. My weapon. At my disposal.”
Then his attention shifts to her.
He leans in, lips hovering near her ear, too close, too intimate, and my vision goes red.
“But she…” he whispers, as if she can’t hear him, as if her fear is something he owns. The barrel glides along her cheek again, a mockery of tenderness. “She’s your punishment.”
His arm tightens fractionally, just enough to remind her who controls her lungs.
“A reminder,” he continues softly, “of what happens when you forget your place.”
My father smiles against her skin like a man delivering a gift.
“Of what happens,” he finishes, voice low and deadly, “when you cross me.”
“Let her go… please.”
The word tastes like defeat on my tongue, and I hate it, hate that I’m saying it, hate that I have to. My voice is barely holding together, splintering at the edges as I force the plea through clenched teeth.
“I’ll do it,” I continue, the bargain falling from me like blood. “Whatever you want. Any assignment. Any penance. I’ll fall in line,”
My throat tightens.
“Just… let her go.”
For a second, satisfaction stains his expression. Not triumph, something worse. Like he’s finally found the exact place to press until I break.
Then his gaze turns cold.
Calculating.
The shift is subtle, almost imperceptible, but it drains the room of oxygen all the same.
My heartbeat pounds so hard it drowns out everything else, a roar in my ears, a drumbeat counting down the seconds I don’t have.
I keep my eyes on her, only her, like looking away might make this real in a way I can’t survive.
Her tears slow, turning heavy. The fight in her is draining, not because she’s giving up, but because her body is running out of room to hold fear and breath and pain all at once. Her eyes say a thousand things she can’t voice, and every one of them guts me.
I stand there, useless.
A weapon with no target.
A man with nothing to trade except himself.
“No,” my father says at last.
One word. Final. Absolute. A verdict.
“You need to be taught a lesson.”
Emmy’s gaze locks onto mine, steady through the terror, through the trembling, and she mouths the words again like she’s anchoring herself to them.
I love you.
Everything slows, an impossible drag of time, like the world itself is reluctant to watch what comes next.
My father moves.
There’s a sharp crack of a bullet, final sound, too loud in the small room, too clean, too certain.
Emmy jerks in his hold, a small broken motion, and then the strength drains out of her as if someone cut the thread that kept her here. Her body slackens. Her eyes find mine for the briefest heartbeat, wide, shining, then the light in them falters as the blood starts pouring from her temple.
My soul tears.
A sound rips out of me, raw and animal, and I don’t recognise it as my own until it’s echoing off hospital walls.
I draw.
I fire at my father.
The recoil hammers up my arms as I send rage across the room in rapid, shaking bursts, forcing my father to stagger, forcing his grip to break, forcing him to lose control of the one thing he never deserved to touch.
Emmy slips.
I surge forward.
And pain detonates through my body.
A violent, searing impact punches into me from behind as my fathers men take their shots at me. Stealing my balance, stealing air, stealing time. My knees hit the floor hard. For a second, everything is nothing but fire and the taste of panic.
But I don’t stop.
I can’t.
I drag myself forward, hands slipping in blood, breath shredding in my throat. The distance between me and Emmy feels like a lifetime. My vision tunnels, the edges darkening, but I keep moving, because the only thing worse than dying is dying without reaching her.
I crawl.
I bleed.
I reach.
My fingers close around her.
I pull her into my arms like I can stitch her back together with the force of my desperation, cradling her against my chest. She’s too still. Too quiet. Her skin already cooling against mine in a way that makes something inside me howl.
“No,” I rasp, voice breaking apart. “No, Emmy, look at me.”
Tears spill down my face, hot and relentless. I press my forehead to hers, shaking.
“I love you,” I choke. “I love you. I love you, please don’t, please don’t leave me.”
I kiss her like it’s a prayer and a promise and a last breath all at once, like love can be enough to pull her back from the edge.
But she doesn’t move.
And the horrible truth settles in, heavy and final:
She’s already gone.
My strength drains out in slow, unstoppable waves. My head lowers to her chest, because there is nowhere else I want to be when the dark comes for me too. My lungs struggle. My heartbeat feels distant, fading.
Then,
Footsteps.
Fast. Heavy. Urgent.
A door slams.
Voices fracture into noise.
And somewhere in the chaos, a new sound cuts through, two sharp cracks that end a conversation permanently.
My father’s presence disappears from the room like a nightmare snapping apart. His dead body drops with a thud. Final.
Boots rush closer.
Someone drops to their knees beside us.
Hands, trembling, reach for me. Not careful. Not controlled. Desperate.
A weapon clatters to the floor like it suddenly weighs too much to hold.
And then I feel it, warmth cupping my face, shaking fingers brushing blood and sweat away as if they can undo what’s happening.
My vision swims. I force my eyes open.
Liam.
Alive.
Real.
For a second my brain refuses it, refuses to believe the universe would be cruel enough to give me him back now, when I’m already falling.
His face crumples as he looks down at me… at Emmy… at the ruin on the floor.
“No,” he breaks, the word shredded from him. “No, Khai, please, please,”
He’s sobbing before he finishes the sentence. Full-body, ugly, devastating grief. The kind that doesn’t care who’s watching. The kind that admits the truth without saying it:
He’s too late.
His hands press to my cheeks like he can hold my life in place. His head dips, shaking, breaths hitching hard. He looks destroyed, like whatever kept him standing has finally given out.
“Khai,” he whispers again, cracking. “I’m here. I’m here, don’t, don’t you dare,”
But my body is already leaving.
The room dims. Sound fades. Liam’s sobs become distant, like they’re coming from the end of a long corridor.
The last thing I see is my brother breaking down over me, alive, undone, helpless, his tears dropping onto my skin like rain.
And then the world goes black.
Jaxon
I don’t remember crossing the room, only my own breathing, jagged and wrong, and the way my boots skid on the polished, slick floor like the building itself is trying to spit me out. The scene ahead doesn’t fit inside my head. It won’t. It’s too big. Too final.
Khai is on the ground, folded over Emmy like he can keep her here by sheer will alone, like his body can be a barricade against fate. Like if he holds tight enough, the world will take it back.
A few paces away, his father lies unnaturally still, the weapon out of reach, the kind of silence settling over him that only comes when a monster stops moving for good. Dead. Finished.
And it doesn’t feel like justice.
It feels like a debt, one that’s been gathering interest for years, finally collected in the only currency that ever mattered in our world.
Bodies. Ruin. Aftermath.
Smoke curls from Liam’s gun as it slips from his fingers and hits the floor with a dull, heavy thud, like even metal can’t bear to stay in his hands for another second.
We were too late.
I knew it the second Khai and I split, knew in that cold, instinctive way you know a blade is already falling. I’d run for Liam like dragging him here could change the ending, like bringing a ghost back into the room might keep the living from becoming one.
But the room doesn’t care about prayers.
Liam is on his knees beside Khai, shaking so hard his whole body looks like it might come apart.
His hands hover, unable to decide whether to hold Khai or break themselves against him.
His face is wrecked, raw disbelief carved into every line, as if surviving wasn’t enough to prepare him for what survival costs.
“No,” he keeps whispering, over and over, like the word has teeth. Like it can bite through time and pull it backward. “No, Khai, please…”
He looks up at me once, eyes wild and ruined, and the sound that comes out of him isn’t speech, its grief given a voice. “I was too late,” he chokes, each syllable collapsing under the weight of it. “I came back… I came back and I was too late.”
He tries to gather Khai closer, frantic, desperate, as if pulling him in could anchor him here. As if a brother’s arms can stitch a soul back into a body with shaking hands and heartbreak.
I grab Liam under the arms and haul him back.
Not gently. Not kindly.
Because if I don’t, he’s going to crawl inside this moment and drown in it.
“Liam,” I snarl, the name ripping my throat open. “Look at me.”
He fights me like something feral, broken and panicked, reaching for Khai with desperate fingers, sobbing like the air has turned to glass in his lungs.
“I’m sorry,” he keeps whispering, again and again, as if apology is a rope he can throw across the distance.
As if Khai can hear him. As if guilt can build a bridge back from the edge.
I drag him another step, my own vision blurring, my heart splitting clean down the middle as I stare at Khai on the floor, because that’s what he is to me, too. Brother. Home. The only constant in a life built on blood.
And the only thing louder than Liam’s grief…
…is the awful, absolute silence where Khai should have been breathing.