Thirty-Nine
Kat
Hurt – Nine Inch Nails
Bright white light burns against my closed eyelids.
So this is it. This is the big white light that they all talk about.
If I open my eyes now, will I see my grandma?
Kurt Cobain? So many questions. I will my eyes to open, but they stay firmly shut.
Why can’t I open them? My body feels heavy.
Not exactly the light and airy feeling I would assume I’d feel after death.
I try to move my fingers, and I think they twitch, but I’m not sure.
I’m vaguely aware of someone calling my name in the distance, the sound of a chair moving, but it’s just beyond my reach.
I feel something against my hand. A touch?
No, it can’t be. I hear another sound. It’s distant and faint, but it’s there. Breathing. Mine.
Am I alive?
My throat stings like I’ve swallowed broken glass.
The smell of laundry detergent hits my nose faintly.
It smells familiar. My brain lags behind my body, trying to piece everything together through the thick fog running through it.
The last thing I remember is… what? I vaguely remember my phone slipping out of my hands.
Then nothing… until now.
My eyes sting as I pry them open, adjusting to the warm light flowing through the curtains. Air burns my lungs as I suck in a breath. My first breath. I try to stretch out the tightness in my body and hiss as pain lances down my arm.
Fuck. That.
The pain makes the memory hit me. The hooded man. The watching. The bathroom. The blood. Elias… But I’m alive? My stomach dips, and I don’t know if it’s relief or disappointment. Maybe both.
I hear movement across the room before warmth engulfs my hand.
“Shh. Don’t move. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Elias.
His voice is rougher than usual, like he hasn’t used it in days.
I turn my head towards the sound as my eyes finally adjust to the light, and I see his beautiful face.
His brows are creased, and his hair, unkempt and unbound, falls across his face.
He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, one of his hands wrapped around mine so tightly his knuckles are pale.
Like he’s afraid I might disappear. There’s a chair pulled close to the bed, a blanket tossed over the back of it, and an empty coffee cup on the nightstand.
I remove my hand from his and try to sit up, my body protesting at every movement.
“Don’t,” Elias moves to hold my back. “You’re still healing.”
I ignore him and sit up anyway, my back thankful for the fluffy goose-down pillows.
I open my mouth to speak, but the sounds get stuck in my dry, cracked throat.
Elias sees this and immediately pulls out a glass of water with a straw, pressing it to my chapped lips.
Sucking down the liquid feels heavenly. Maybe I am in heaven after all.
Looking at the worry etched on Elias’s face, though, reminds me I’m not.
I finish the entire glass, and the cool liquid does its job of soothing my raw throat. He takes the glass back, and we sit in silence for a moment, his hand returning to cup my own.
“What happened?” I ask, my voice sounding hoarse.
“After you called, I had no idea where you were. But I knew something was wrong. We tracked your phone to your apartment.” He pauses. His jaw ticks before he continues. “You lost too much blood… you needed a transfusion. I’m O-Negative, so I gave you my blood.”
“Like the band.” I smile, but I know it doesn’t reach my eyes. Guilt wracks my entire body as I look at him. Really look at him. He’s pale, and the dark circles under his eyes let me know he hasn’t slept in… well, however long I’ve been here.
There’s a clear stain on his shirt. It’s uneven and slightly faded, spread across the front.
Blood. My blood. The sight of it makes my stomach churn.
It shouldn’t be on him. None of this should be on him.
Elias is always so composed, and now he looks…
ruined. And I did that. I didn’t just hurt myself. I hurt him, too.
“I’m so sorry, Elias. I never wanted you to see me like that. I don’t want to die—I never wanted to die. It just—” My breath hitches, and my eyes sting with unshed tears. “It all just got too much.”
He brings my hand up to his lips and plants a soft kiss against my palm. A single tear falls silently from his eyes. The sight makes my chest ache and guilt wrack my body. I never wanted this. I never wanted to hurt him.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asks gently, his thumb rubbing small circles against the back of my hand.
My heartbeat threatens to pulse out of my chest. I want to tell him. I need to tell him. But my mind won’t allow it. My heart screams inside my chest with all the words it wants to say, but my mouth won’t open.
“I know you were followed,” he says carefully. “I had Cain pull the security footage of your building. We’re working on finding out who it was.”
I breathe out a sigh of relief. At least I don’t have to tell him that part.
“Do you know who was following you?”
I shake my head. No. No. I can’t do this. A sheen of sweat forms on my brow. Tears flow freely down my face as my breathing picks up the pace.
“I don’t need to know everything, Kat. Just give me a name.”
“I can’t!” I shout. The pain in my arm and the constant reminder of my fucking failure and brokenness fuel the sobs that wrack my body.
He slides into the bed beside me and holds my head against his chest. The steady thump of his heartbeat grounds me until the sobs dissipate to shivers.
“I know you have your reservations about me and my life. But please believe me when I say that I will never let anyone hurt you. Ever again.”
“You can’t promise that,” I whisper as my eyes fall closed, pushing the residual tears onto my cheek.
“Then let me earn your trust. I know you don’t want to tell me what happened. But let me tell you why I am the way that I am. I am not him.”
“You don’t have to do that.” I shake my head.
He takes my chin between his thumb and forefinger, lifting my eyes up to meet his. They’re dark and full of resolve. “I want to. I should have told you this a long time ago.”
The air around us shifts. Elias has never been a closed book, but he’s never offered up information before. And now he’s sitting here, looking at me like he’s about to crack open the deepest, most painful part of himself. And I can’t give him a single fucking name.
He moves to the end of the bed and sits facing me. He takes my good hand in his and takes a deep breath. I open my mouth to protest some more, but his voice cuts me off.
“I had a sister. She was two years younger than me. I don’t remember her being born.
I just remember her always being there. Her name was Iris.
She used to follow me everywhere.” A faint smile touches his mouth, but it doesn’t linger for long.
“She had this ridiculous laugh. It was loud. Completely unrestrained. My parents used to complain about it all the time because it echoed through the whole house.” He glances down at our joined hands, his eyes focusing on the point where our index fingers touch.
“Iris was the kind of kid who couldn’t walk past a stray animal without trying to bring it home.
Cats, dogs, birds with broken wings—it didn’t matter.
If it needed saving, she was there. She once tried to hide a raccoon in her room. ”
I blink. “A raccoon?”
He huffs a small laugh. “Yeah, that was a fun day.” The smile fades just as quickly as it appeared.
“She drove me crazy growing up. Always stealing my hoodies, barging into my room without knocking. And she always asked a million questions. About everything, she was always so curious about everything. From how a computer worked to why the fucking sky was blue.” His thumb presses absentmindedly against my knuckles.
“But she trusted me. Completely. If there was a monster under her bed, she came to me. If someone picked on her at school, she came to me.” His voice grows quieter.
“And I always told her I’d take care of it. ”
My heartbeat hammers against my chest as he takes a long pause, considering his next words.
“Growing up, our parents were the hands-off type. They let us do whatever we wanted, as long as no one was getting hurt or arrested, they didn’t care.
” His smile breaks with a slight twitch of his jaw.
“When you’re a teenager, it’s great. We went to parties, stayed out late.
We loved it. We walked together every day to school.
My school was a little further than hers, so I always walked her to the gates, said goodbye before going to school myself.
” He takes a shaky breath, and I give his hand a small squeeze.
“One day, after school, I waited outside her school for an hour. At first, I wasn’t worried.
Iris was thirteen. She was old enough to hang out with her friends after school.
” His gaze drifts toward the window, like he’s watching the memory play out somewhere in the street outside.
“I leaned against the fence and waited. Kids poured out of the gates in waves. I kept expecting to see her blonde hair in the crowd.”
My chest tightens as my thumb runs circles over his knuckles.
“But the crowd got smaller and smaller.” He swallows. “And eventually, the teachers started locking up the building.”
A cold knot forms in my stomach and fresh tears sting behind my eyes.
“I walked home thinking she just got out early and walked home with some friends. She’d done that before.
Or maybe she’d caught a ride with her friends’ parents.
She’d also done that before.” His voice drops lower.
“But when I opened the door, the house was empty. That’s when I knew something was wrong.
For two weeks,” he continues, his voice now gravelly.
“Every time the phone rang, we thought it might be news. Two weeks of a sick cycle of hope, fear, and hope again. Over and fucking over. My parents stopped sleeping. Stopped eating. They just sat by the phone waiting to hear which part of the cycle it would be that day.”
His fingers tighten around mine, and I tighten mine around his in return.
“And when the police finally showed up, I knew before they said a word. There’s something about the way people look at you when your world is about to end.”
“Pity,” the word comes out of my mouth before I even register it.
His eyes flick up to mine, a knowing look there. “That’s the moment everything broke,” he tells me. “They found her raped and mutilated and dumped on the side of the highway like fucking trash. They never found the person who did it.”
Silent tears fall slowly down my face.
Elias pauses, his throat bobbing gently before he continues.
“It tore the family apart. My parents started using drugs—heroin mainly. When they got really bad, they couldn’t leave the house to get their supply, so they turned me into their drug runner.
If there was anything worse than my parents on drugs, it was my parents coming off drugs, so I didn’t really have a choice.
Not if I wanted to survive.” His face contorts in disgust as he relives the memory.
“I spent a lot of my late teen years in drug dens. I made friends with the wrong people and got into drug running before I turned seventeen, and I was running the place before I turned twenty. I saw the effect that drugs have on people. We were dealing to kids too.”
He scoffs, his eyes returning their focus to our joined hands.
“So I changed things. We switched from drugs to hacking. It’s amazing how easy it was.
We stole money from the rich instead of ruining the lives of the poor.
I knew that drugs were being dealt in Bridgeport, so I went to stop it.
I approached other gangs in the city and…
” He pauses. “I’ve killed people. A lot of people.
We couldn’t move forward without it. And here I am today.
I run The Circle, a syndicate that keeps all the gangs in Bridgeport in line. They answer to me.”
I look at him through my tear-streaked eyes.
I should be scared. Normal people would be scared.
But I’m not normal—and neither is he. All I see when I look at him is the boy who waited outside a school gate for his little sister.
The boy who thought he’d walk her home that day like always.
The boy who never had a chance before life twisted him into what he is.
But the grief is still there, it’s what drives him to make the city better.
He’s nothing like him.
“What happened to your parents?” I whisper.
“They overdosed a few years ago,” he says, voice completely devoid of emotion.
I get up, ignoring the pain in my wrist, and rest on my knees. His face is pained, like he’s reliving everything again in his mind. I pull him towards me and wrap my arms around him tightly.
“I’m so sorry,”
We stay like this for a while. The room is quiet around us.
No horns blasting in the street, no birds chirping, just the slow rhythm of Elias’s breathing against my ear.
His arms tighten slightly around me, careful not to touch my injured wrist. His chest rises and falls softly beneath my cheek as his slow and steady heartbeat grounds me.
For the first time since I woke up, my body begins to settle. The panic that’s been chronically clawing at my ribs for months eases. His hand moves slowly up and down my spine, and the warmth of him seeps into my skin.
I close my eyes for a moment and let myself breathe calming breaths. I’m alive. And right now, that’s all that matters.
“I love you, Kat,” he whispers in my ear.
My breath hitches. This is the moment I thought I might never have.
“I love you too, Elias Monroe.”