Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Halo
“Broken Wing”
It rained the next morning. It made me feel like my transgression had followed me back to the motel. It wasn’t the same downpour though; this was a softer rain. The kind of rain that makes everything smell like wet pavement and rotting grass. Not violent, just steady.
We didn’t leave the room. I had to extend our stay, much to Eden’s dismay.
She didn’t say it, but I could tell she didn’t want to be here anymore.
These things took time, and I needed to come up with my plan for taking these men out.
I was hoping I’d find something where I could pick several off at once.
I wanted to do this as clean as possible, without any loose ends.
I needed a plan that didn’t end with Eden in a morgue.
That was my priority. I stared at the folder in front of me, thumbing through the things the men had in common.
I was looking for efficiency, minimal fallout.
Eden sat on the bed in an oversized sleep shirt that belonged to me, but she’d claimed it as hers. She had her legs crossed, sketching something on a diner napkin. It didn’t look like anything. Scribbles. Shapes. Her mind working in arcane spirals I hadn’t figured out how to read yet.
“I used to want to be a vet,” she said, like it just slipped out. Like the silence between us had grown too thick.
I looked up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I used to rescue cats off the street. Once I brought home a pigeon with a broken wing and kept it in the bathtub.”
I paused, putting the paper in my hand down. That mental image of her, younger and somehow even more innocent, bending over a tub and whispering kindness to a broken thing. It hit me harder than it should have.
“Did it make it?”
She shook her head. “But I tried.”
That did something to me. Twisted a nerve I didn’t know I still had.
The simplicity of her answer. The quiet resolve.
Of course she tried. That was the thing about Eden, she would always try, even when there was no hope.
She would try until she was out of breath, out of options, out of time.
Even when she knew it wouldn’t change anything.
“Why’d you stop?” I asked, I couldn’t meet her eyes.
She shrugged. “I just wasn’t very good at it. I always wanted to help people too, but I’ve never been good with people, either.”
I should’ve said nothing. I should’ve let it drift off like so many other things between us, but I didn’t. “You can’t be serious.”
Her pen stilled. “What do you mean?”
“You light up people’s lives, every day. I watched you. Everyone left happier than they did before they met you.”
Instead of accepting the compliment, she tilted her head. “What about you?”
I didn’t answer right away. I just stared at her: the lines of her face, the way she folded herself in like she was trying to disappear and be seen all at once.
She smiled like none of this shit touched her and the weight of everything hadn’t tried to crush her three times already, even though I knew it was breaking her more and more every second.
And I thought about the pigeon in the bathtub. Broken-winged and waiting, probably scared, probably already aware that it was doomed. But she’d done it anyway. Carried it home, held it in her hands, poured herself into something that didn’t want to survive.
That was what she was doing now.
Only this time, it wasn’t a bird. It was me.
“I think I want things I shouldn’t want,” I said. My voice came out low. “And you make it harder to pretend I don’t.”
There it was: hung between us tight and fragile. One wrong move and it would snap.
She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her watching me like I was some wounded thing she didn’t know how to hold. I couldn’t sit in it. I stood up too fast and grabbed my jacket off the chair.
“I’m gonna check the perimeter.”
I didn’t look at her when I said it, I couldn’t.
I just walked out into the rain, let it hit me, tried to let it wash the scent of her off my skin, to cleanse me of the memory of her voice, her eyes, her belief in things that didn’t deserve redemption.
Because if I stayed in that room another second, I would’ve told her everything.
And if I told her everything… about how I felt about her, the lengths to which I was willing to go, about the girl I had killed in the alleyway, the weight in my chest, all the blood on my hands… she might finally stop trying to salvage me, stop trying to win me over.
I couldn’t survive that.