Chapter Forty-Two
Max
The car smells like leather, cordite, and something scorched. My ears are still singing a high, electric pitch like they made when Gio went down.
And the sirens chase us, or just sound like they do, until even they get swallowed by the eeee.
Nico’s hands are at ten and two. His knuckles are chalk white. Gio is beside him, in front of me, alive, breathing too fast. Rudi, next to me, keeps looking out the back window like he can control the cars behind us.
“There’s no surviving that.” Nico’s voice echoes and bobs, sounding like he’s underwater. He says it to no one. Or, I guess he says it to me as my name filters through the ringing. “Max.”
The name lands and doesn’t.
I hear the words.
I take inventory of them like I’m studying: subject, verb, object, verdict.
No appeal.
My brain tries to swim through the water surrounding me.
Days ago, the worst thing in my life was whether my Con Law course’s outline had enough cases in it.
Spring break is next week.
Cal told me to pack nothing.
He was going to lock me in our bedroom and order takeout and turn off the world, and I told him that sounded like kidnapping, and he joked it was—
My thoughts stutter.
Kidnapping.
The house is full of people when we get there and somehow empty, too.
They strip the cold of the alley off me with a blanket, but the grease on my clothes refuses to be ignored.
I sit cross-legged in front of the hearth because it’s the only heat that doesn’t make me nauseous.
A real fire, not the safe, electric flicker of my office fireplace. The flames crackle and pop and one of the pops is a little sharper, and I flinch so hard my teeth clack.
The room does a small tilt, then rights itself.
Voices, soft, behind me.
The sisters.
Their whispers sound like prayer beads—small, clicking kindness.
“She jumped.”
“Nico.”
“She’s not… she’s—”
“Catatonic,” someone decides, gentle and wrong.
I hear everything. I register everything.
I decide to blink because blinking is a thing I can choose. I blink and the fire is still there.
And he’s not.
Nico crouches into my space like you would with a startled animal. He doesn’t touch me. He has a streak of black on his cheekbone and my eyes focus on it. He notices my stare, wipes at his face, and instead of wiping it away, red from his palm streaks next to the black.
“Max.” He waits until I look at him, dazed.
He has Renzetti eyes in different weather, more stormy, grey at the edges mixing in with green and gold. “We’re going to move you, okay? You—we can’t stay here.”
“I won’t go to the penthouse.” My voice works. It sounds ripped at the seams, but it works.
It surprises both of us.
“I know,” he responds immediately, like he already hates himself for even thinking it. “Good. Not the penthouse. A hotel. The best. We’ll take the whole floor. No one in, no one out. Doors blocked. You tell us where you want people to stand and they stand there.”
“I want to be alone.”
A small break in his composure; I see it in his eyes.
He covers it with orders, as if instructions are sandbags you can stack against a flood. His eyes don’t leave me, but everyone else moves around us as he speaks.
“Gio, Rudi—hotel. The—” He snaps his fingers, searching for language like he left it in the alley. “—the best one. Rent the floor. Nobody up. Post the stairs. Two at the elevator. Two at the service door.”
“I want to be alone.” I repeat it, but I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to.
He drags a breath in, makes it soft. “We’ll be in the hall. Or outside your door. And across the street. Wherever you want. But we’re not leaving you completely alone, Max. Cal won’t let me do that.”
Wouldn’t. He wouldn’t let Nico do that.
The past tense walks through me like a draft under a door. It ices everything it touches.
The fire doesn’t feel warm anymore.
I stand. The blanket falls.
Nobody stops me until the foyer.
He was here in this spot this morning—no, not today, whatever day it was where the world still made sense—running back through this exact space with a stupid grin and a quick press of lips because he forgot something.
That couldn’t have just been this morning. Yesterday? What day is it? I think to myself slowly.
Whatever day it was, the world was right, on its axis, spinning. And then it stopped. Or I guess it didn’t. Just me. I stopped.
There’s no surviving that, Nico’s words echo in my head.
He is gone.
Nico’s hand finds my elbow. It’s careful, gentle, but out of place. I look at it until he removes it.
“You can’t leave,” he says it slowly, carefully, but with weight behind it, and he means the building but he might as well mean the world.
“I can do whatever I want,” I spit back. “And I don’t want to be here.”
The rules ceased to exist back in that alley, I can break every one of them now.
He nods like a man agreeing with gravity.
“Okay. Okay. Hotel,” he tells the others, fumbling for steadiness with logistics. “Rudi, get the car. Gio, the kits. We’ll meet you in the driveway.”
“I said I want to be alone.”
“Respectfully, Max, you do not get to be alone with this, not completely. I can’t let you, he won’t—” he chokes on the words, coughing on a sob. “We’ll be where you tell us to be, but you will not be alone.”
I don’t answer.
I turn on my bare feet and walk out into the night and open the first car door I find and sit.
The leather is cold. My hands are steady. My ears are not. The ringing comes back and I welcome it, because then I don’t have to hear the people around me.
We drive.
I make them take the long way for no reason except the world keeps trying to shortcut toward places I can’t stand to see, and I’m not borrowing tomorrow’s problems, and I refuse to see the penthouse when he will never walk its halls again.
Out the window, the city moves past like a slow parade of doors I don’t open.
That I’ll never open again.