Chapter 33
Chapter thirty-three
Eden
“This Burden We Carry”
I’d grown used to the sound of Halo pacing.
I knew his rhythms by now: the shift of his weight as he checked the blinds, the muted creak of the floor near the table, the way he tapped the same spot on the edge of the counter when he was thinking.
But this morning, he just stood still. I looked up from where I was pretending to read on the bed.
He was dressed, jacket zipped halfway, boots laced, keys in hand.
His bag was by the door again, but his face wasn’t wearing the usual mask.
“You need to get out,” he said simply.
I blinked. “Like… out out?”
“Yeah, out out.”
I stood slowly. “Okay. What’s the catch?”
“No catch,” he said, already heading for the door. “Unless you count someone possibly giving me a location… I just need to talk to a guy; you can sit in the car and wait. Then we’ll go to the store. If we’re going to be stuck here much longer, we’ll need some things.”
“So this is like… recon or something?”
“Get your shoes on, or I’m leaving you,” he said in a sing-song voice.
I scrambled to my feet, putting on my shoes and following him out the door with a bounce in my step.
He opened the car door for me, but it seemed like it was less about politeness and more that he didn’t want my back turned to the world for even a moment.
When he shut the door, I saw him give the parking lot one good look.
I thought I should tell him about the man at the vending machine… but I just couldn’t.
We were halfway down a rural stretch of nowhere, with nothing but cracked pavement and dry fields on either side. He turned on the radio, and it gave way to a faint tune. Fleetwood Mac, I think.
I leaned back in the passenger seat, one foot tucked up underneath me. “Okay, so, important question.”
He gave me a glance, almost nervous. “What?”
“What’s your ‘windows down, driving at sunset’ song?”
He snorted softly. “Is that a real thing?”
“Obviously.” I shot him a sideways look. “Everyone has one. It's the song that makes you feel like you're starring in your own movie.”
He was quiet for a second. Then: “Maybe... ‘Simple Man.’”
“Oh my God, of course it’s ‘Simple Man,’” I laughed.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s every guy’s go-to when they want to seem deep.”
He shook his head, amused. “Okay, then. What’s yours?”
“‘Edge of Seventeen.’ Stevie Nicks forever.” I didn’t hesitate, palms up like I was offering sage knowledge.
He smirked. “You would pick something about white-winged doves and poetic heartbreak.”
“Don’t mock the queen.”
“I’m not mocking,” he said, though his smile lingered. “I just didn’t peg you as a ‘drive barefoot and scream-cry to Stevie’ type.”
“You really haven’t been paying attention, have you?”
The moment stretched. His eyes flicked to me again, something soft passing between us. Moments later, he turned the music down.
“We’re here.”
We pulled into a dirt lot behind a sagging bar that looked condemned. I hadn’t really been paying attention, and now I wasn’t even sure where we were. There wasn’t much out here, wherever it was.
“Stay in the car,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “Obviously.”
When he stepped out and closed the door, I sat up straighter to watch the way he moved, calm and unhurried.
I could see how he could be intimidating in the right circumstances.
Not just his resting bitch face or his stature, but his entire aura.
He approached a man leaning against a rusted dumpster.
I watched as they spoke, noting how the other man’s body language was much less confident. He was twitchy, nervous, distrustful.
Then I saw Halo reach into his jacket. The man raised his hands in protest, but it didn’t matter.
It happened so fast… so fast it felt like the world fell out from under me.
One second they were talking, the next Halo had him pinned against the dumpster.
He used his body and left hand to hold the man up.
Jesus, it wasn’t unlike the way he’d held me in the shower.
He had a blade in hand, and he was stabbing without any hesitation.
It was brutal, efficient, quiet. The man sputtered over Halo’s shoulder, spitting blood down his back as he stared off in a state of shock.
I couldn’t move either. I couldn’t blink or breathe or swallow. Everything blurred around me.
When it was done, Halo dropped the man, pulling the man’s coat off and using it to wipe his blade and the blood off of his shoulder. He looked around, not frantic or concerned… just checking, like this was a job site, and he was making sure it was clear.
Then he walked back toward me as though nothing had happened. Panic took hold of me, and I slumped back down into the seat, trying to quell the nausea I felt.
He opened the driver’s door and slid in, the car shifting under his weight. “Didn’t take long,” he said, breathing even and controlled.
I didn’t speak, my voice wasn’t available. I could barely hold eye contact.
He looked over at me, brow furrowed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
I said it too fast, voice so unsteady. Was I afraid? I wanted to look over at him, to convince myself he was still the man who’d washed my hair in the shower and whispered soft things against my throat.
“Eden—”
“I said nothing.”
I didn’t want to lie, but I also didn’t want the truth spoken aloud. I didn’t want to admit that watching him kill someone—not hearing about it, not reading the report, but seeing it—had done something irreversible to my insides.
We drove in silence.
He parked in front of a dusty little grocery store on the edge of the same town where he had killed the man at the bar. It had a cartoon pig on the sign and flyers in the windows advertising sales. It was quaint, adorable. I might have swooned over how picturesque it was, any other day.
Halo got out of the car, but I couldn’t move. I sat, staring straight ahead. He opened my door for me and offered me his hand. I thought I could still see the tiniest spatter of blood on his wrist.
“Come on,” he said.
I stayed frozen.
“Eden?”
I turned my head away from him, so he couldn’t see whatever it was that I was feeling.
“I don’t want to see more of what you do.” The words came out brittle and too quiet.
Halo didn’t move right away. I didn’t look at him, but I felt him there. His presence always arrived before his voice: heat and weight and gravity.
In my periphery, I saw him crouch down next to the open door, lowering himself to my level.
His voice was soft. “You saw.”
It wasn’t a question, just a somber statement.
I nodded once, eyes still fixed on the cartoon pig on the sign above the store. “You didn’t know?”
“I had a feeling. The way you looked when I got in the car. You were so still.”
I swallowed. My mouth felt dry, my throat thick. “What was I supposed to do?”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“I don’t know.”
I turned to look at him. There was blood drying at the edge of his collar, a smear of it on the skin just below his jaw. Not enough that anyone would even notice, but I did because I had seen where it came from.
“You didn’t even hesitate. You didn’t flinch or stop or…” My voice broke. “He begged you.”
He kept me locked in his gaze. “He was playing both sides. I couldn’t let him go and possibly tell someone I was asking questions. He was a liability. He was going to run his mouth, you could see it in his eyes.
“I saw his eyes after, Halo.”
“This is what it looks like. The things that keep me alive, that let me keep you alive.”
I flinched at that. “Don’t you dare make this about protecting me.”
“I didn’t want you to see. I thought if I parked facing the other way, you wouldn’t look back, and it would be so quick, you wouldn’t even notice.”
The wind picked up a little, rustling the flyers in the window. It was too quiet out here. It made the moment feel like a vacuum. Finally, I reached for the door and stepped out. He didn’t touch me, he just waited. I could feel his eyes on me the whole way to the entrance.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead like insects. A tinny pop song played from some distant speaker. Everything felt off-kilter, too bright, too harsh. I grabbed a basket, clutched it tight in both hands like an anchor.
Halo kept close, but not hovering. I could feel him adjusting his distance with every step like he was giving me space, even if it was killing him not to close it.
I stared at a shelf of crackers for so long, my eyes went blurry.
“You like the rosemary ones,” he said quietly behind me.
I turned my head just slightly. “What?”
“I saw them in your apartment. You ate half the box in one night while you watched movies.”
I blinked. “You noticed that?”
“I notice everything.”
The weight of that settled heavily between us.
I moved forward, pulling down a box without looking.
I went through the rest of the store on autopilot: bread, peanut butter, trail mix, a bottle of Tylenol, shampoo.
I was just putting things into the basket that made me feel like a person.
When we got to the refrigerated section, I paused in front of the eggs, even though I knew I couldn’t use them.
The only hot food I had eaten was from the diner. Halo came to a slow stop beside me.
“You can ask me,” he said. “If it’ll help.”
“Will it?”
“No. But sometimes knowing the truth hurts less than imagining it.”
I let out a breath. “Do you always kill them?”
“No.”
“But you knew you were going to kill him.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
I finally turned to face him. “Does it ever get to you? The killing?”
He looked at me like I’d just asked if he ever slept. Like I didn’t understand the question. Then he said, “It gets to me when you look at me like that.”
My throat went tight. “I don’t want to look at you differently,” I said quietly, “but I don’t know how not to.”
He didn’t speak. He just waited. That patience of his – the same kind that let him stare a man down before taking his shot – was now stretched between us.
“We should go.”
I didn’t remember checking out at the counter.
I assumed Halo paid with cash. It was like I blinked, and we were back at the motel.
I stared at the door to the room like I was walking into my own tomb.
He carried the bags inside, without asking, and put them on the table.
I noticed he’d quietly taken the shampoo and put it on the bathroom sink like nothing had happened.
He acted like we hadn’t had a brush with something sharp and unspoken in that store.
When I went to sit down on the bed, I realized my hands were shaking.
“Do you want me to leave you alone?” he asked.
I wanted to say yes, but I also wanted to say no. I wanted to ask if it ever scared him, what he was capable of. I wanted to ask how he could still look in the mirror.
What came out instead was, “Can you just sit here? Just… not talk. Just be here.”
He nodded once. “Yeah. I can do that.”
And he did. He sat on the edge of the bed beside me, elbows on his knees, head bowed. He stayed there for a long time, silent and still. I watched him, this man who could destroy someone with his bare hands but who now sat with those very hands held carefully between his knees.
I woke up later that night because I couldn’t breathe.
It wasn’t really a panic attack. It was just…
pressure in my chest, in my head. Like something was sitting on top of me.
The motel room was dark, except for the dull orange glow from the streetlamp bleeding through the curtain.
It lit the room in slices, cutting across the carpet like a series of wounds.
I looked across the room to where Halo was asleep in the chair, or pretending to be.
He hadn’t said much after the store, hadn’t looked at me the way he usually did.
No teasing remark, no quiet questions, no checking in every fifteen minutes to make sure I was still breathing.
He was giving me space, the one thing I didn’t know how to fill.
He didn’t try to sleep in the bed with me, which I was thankful for.
I didn’t know if I could handle it right now.
I got up quietly, my feet hitting the cold tile in the bathroom. The faucet squeaked like it was protesting the silence, and I splashed cold water on my face.
I had seen a man die. Not in the distant way we talk about war or crime or stories on the news.
I had seen his eyes. I had watched someone’s last breath hitch and spatter against Halo’s jacket.
It wasn’t the same as seeing him beat the cop to death in my apartment, although that had stunned me too.
That felt so different. He was directly defending me.
Halo didn’t flinch when he killed that guy today. Not even once. That was the part that kept looping in my mind. Not the violence, but the ease. No rage, just necessity, precision. A kind of detachment.
I slid to the floor of the bathroom, knees against my chest and I buried my face in my arms.
Eventually I heard movement behind the door. His soft steps halted at the door, but he didn’t knock. I heard him lean against the frame, quiet and hesitant.
“You okay?”
“I think…” I said slowly.
“Can I open the door?”
“Okay.”
He opened the door but stayed a shadow in the doorway.
“You should go back to sleep,” I whispered.
“I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not,” I lied.
He nodded like he heard the truth under the lie. He moved slowly, sliding down onto the floor across from me. We sat in silence. My heart was beating like a warning bell in my chest, but I didn’t move. He didn’t either. After a long moment, he spoke again.
“The first person I killed was my own father. I didn’t sleep for three nights. I watched the hallways, thinking someone would come for me. I was sixteen.”
I looked at him, but he still wasn’t looking at me.
“He was a piece of shit. He used to fight with our mom. Real knock-down, drag-out fights. She always fought back. I would go into my sister’s room and put her headphones on her and sneak her a snack, then I’d tuck her into bed and shut the door.
Sometimes dad beat me too… but I didn’t ever want him to touch my sister.
She was fiery. She still is. When mom died, she became the next victim.
I couldn’t have it. My sister would have never backed down.
We put sleeping pills in his booze, then we set the house on fire. I’m not ashamed of killing him.”
“Do you feel shame now?” I asked softly.
“Only when you look at me like that.”
“I don’t know how else to look at you.”
“I know, but I’ll be the one who carries this. You don’t have to.”
“I already am,” I whispered.
And he didn’t tell me I was wrong.