Chapter Twelve #3
My body locks against it, muscles seizing as the sensation spikes, like my insides are being turned inside out. My vision fractures at the edges, the world stuttering as the thing is forced back, inch by brutal inch, through a space it was never meant to fit through.
It resists.
I feel it cling.
Feel it try to anchor itself in the places it already touched, in the grief it found, in the memory it tried to carve open.
Astrid…
Her face flashes, not as memory, but as something suspended in the space between, close enough to reach. Clear, whole, and untouched by what came after.
My hand lifts before I can stop it.
Not much, barely a shift. A fraction of movement that no one else would see.
But I feel it.
The pull.
Three hundred and fifty years, and it is still there, buried under discipline, distance, and everything I have built to survive her loss. The instinct to reach. To take one step forward instead of back. To choose her, just once, without consequence.
For a single, dangerous second…
I almost do.
The hollow tightens around that hesitation, sensing it, feeding on it, trying to turn that fraction into something irreversible.
Stay.
The word isn’t hers, but it lands as if it could be.
My jaw locks. No!
The refusal is immediate this time.
Final.
Because I know exactly what that step costs.
I know what she asked of me, and I have already paid that price once.
I force my hand down, force the connection closed, force every instinct that still reaches for her back into the place it belongs.
Then I push.
Hard.
The pressure spikes, violent and unbearable, as I rip the hollow free, tearing it out of every place it tried to root itself, dragging it back into the crate with a force that leaves nothing behind but absence.
It goes all at once.
The hollow.
The echo.
Her.
The space they leave is raw, oversensitive, my nerves lit like exposed wire as my body fights to recalibrate around the sudden emptiness. My lungs drag in air that feels too cold, too sharp, even though I don’t need it to breathe, as everything inside me settles into something that feels… quieter.
I stand there for a second too long.
Not moving.
Not looking back.
Because I know what’s in that crate now.
What I left there.
Then I step out and close the door, my body giving out, and I drop to my knees.
I register the iron bolts slamming into place behind it as it hits the crate, the sound sharp and final, and Bennett’s seal follows a fraction of a second later, white light flaring hard enough to burn through the dark before snapping shut with a sense of closure that feels less like relief and more like containment.
Water continues to shift against the hull, metal creaks and settles somewhere above us, the low mechanical rhythm of the place carrying on as if nothing just tried to crawl its way out of a human body and into something else.
But the space immediately around us tightens, the aftermath of it settling into something heavier, something that holds for a moment before it starts to release.
I don’t move right away.
Not because I can’t, but because I’m taking stock, letting everything fall back into place in the order it needs to.
Balance comes first, followed by the subtle recalibration of muscle and instinct after something foreign has been inside the system and then removed.
By the time I push to my feet, the motion is steady, deliberate, nothing about it suggesting that anything has been taken from me that I haven’t reclaimed.
I’m aware of them before I look.
Both prospects move in beside me without being told, one on either side, their usual dumbass back-and-forth gone for once.
The loose chaos they normally carry settles into something tighter now, attention sharpened and locked forward while the reality of the situation finally cuts through the bullshit.
“You good?” Rhett asks, his voice lower than usual, the edge of it tempered.
“I’m always good,” I lie, already standing.
“You were on your knees.”
“I was resting.”
There’s the slightest pause before he adds, “Your nose is bleeding.”
I don’t bother answering because I can feel it, the delayed warmth catching up, the line of it tracking down in a way that confirms what he’s already seen. I wipe it away with the back of my wrist without looking at it, because it doesn’t change anything that matters.
What does…
I turn back toward the hold.
The crate sits sealed and still, Bennett already stepping away from it, the last of that light gone from his hands, his attention moving forward without hesitation. The job we came here for is contained.
The rest of it isn’t.
“Worker,” I say, and start moving.
They fall in without comment, the three of us cutting through the hold in a straight line, the air still carrying the faint remnants of what was just here, sharp enough to track if you know what you’re looking for.
We find Anderson at the far end, behind a stack of unmarked pallets, exactly where the trail drops off.
He’s on the floor, knees pulled in tight, hands pressed hard over his ears, his entire body folded in on itself like he’s trying to shut something out that isn’t staying outside.
There’s a slight, repetitive motion to it, a barely-there rocking that speaks to something looping in his head, something he’s still hearing even now.
The hollow barely touched him, moved through him like a door that didn’t need to open, pushed on to richer sources. He’s shaking and conscious. He’s a mortal who came to work a night shift and ended up somewhere his understanding of the world has no map for.
I crouch in front of him. He looks up at me, his eyes carrying that shift that says nothing he believed a minute ago is holding up anymore.
My compulsion is in his eyes before he can form another thought.
Anderson will remember a gas leak, a chemical smell that was disorienting, the kind that sends crews out of a hold fast. A brief evacuation, some confusion, and he signed off on the shipment before symptoms started.
Checked, correct, cleared. He’ll have the paperwork in his hand with no memory of how it got there.
The dock workers get the same. The unconscious one first, then the man the hollow wore, who is already returning to himself, blinking at the container wall with an expression of profound and sourceless exhaustion.
Coil reappears at the entrance to the hold, fully human-formed again, unhurried. “Crates are on the truck. Paperwork’s clean.”
“The Voss family will be having a very interesting conversation with the club,” I say.
“I’ll arrange it,” Coil states.
“And Coil… every future Voss shipment gets inventoried by you personally before it crosses our border. Every crate, every seal… I want to know what else they’ve been quietly importing in our containers.”
He meets my eyes, reads what’s underneath the instruction, and nods once. “Understood.”
***
The van is quiet on the way back.
Rhett sits in the back and stares out the window at nothing.
The hellfire in his eyes has guttered low, the night-tracking part of him still settling back into its case.
Bennett is in the passenger seat, running a cloth over a knife that doesn’t need cleaning, the compulsive motion of someone winding down from a long expenditure of power.
And I drive.
I can still feel the edges of where the hollow was. Not a wound or any kind of damage, just like a fingerprint left by something that pressed too hard into memories I thought I had pushed far enough down to forget.
I’ll be fine by morning.
I’m always fine.
The highway unrolls ahead of us, empty and dark.
Then, from the back, Rhett pipes up, “For what it’s worth, what you did with that thing inside you. Walking it back like that—” He stops his voice, stripped of its usual grin, then starts again. “I don’t have a word for what that was.”
I don’t answer.
Bennett, still looking at the knife, says quietly, “It was… remarkable.”
Another silence. Long enough that I think it might stay that way.
“I’m totally telling Raze,” Rhett chuckles.
“Rhett,” I drone.
“I’m definitely telling Raze you were on your knees,” Bennett adds.
A small grin crosses my lips. “Keep talking, and I’ll have Coil lace your next meal with his venom. Let’s see how far you get after that.”
“You wouldn’t!”
My red eyes glare at him in the rearview mirror. “Try me.”
“Fine… I won’t say a word,” Bennett says, still not looking up. “On the condition that you admit I was useful tonight.”
I let the silence sit.
He held the line, burned everything he had to hold it, and never wavered or complained.
“You held the line, both of you did,” I say.
Bennett leans back in his chair without saying another word, but I still catch the tiny shift in him. Small enough that most people would miss it. That quiet little satisfaction of somebody who got acknowledged and isn’t going to ruin the moment by making a big deal out of it.
“That’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to either of us,” Rhett chimes.
“Savor it,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”
“Yeah.” Rhett leans back against the window, and the grin returns, slower than usual and more real for it. “But it happened.”
I focus on the road.
Fucking-cocky-prospects!