61. Holden
SIXTY-ONE
HOLDEN
The apartment clean took three hours.
New door hung, bloody section of carpet ripped out, couch cushion bagged, blood scrubbed away with the emergency supplies I keep in my kit for exactly this kind of situation. Micah and I didn’t talk through the clean. There was nothing to say that the work wasn’t already saying.
This is my fucking fault.
I should have been here. Should have stationed myself outside her door instead of across the fucking parking lot.
I should have anticipated that Tyler—or any number of those fucking guys—would find another way in.
The should-haves pile up like bodies, and I carry each one with the same precision I use to lift the stained carpet section into the contractor bag.
Once everything is scrubbed clean, we take the evidence to the burn bin, then head back home. Micah falls asleep in the passenger seat before we’ve even hit the highway. Then he’s up the second I turn onto my street. His internal clock is a precision instrument. I envy it.
The house is dark. I pull into the driveway and cut the engine and sit for a moment in the silence, hands on the wheel.
“Eli’s car is here, but Knox’s truck isn’t,” I say. “He’s probably still at the funeral home helping Dean.”
Micah nods, rubbing at his eyes. “No lights on inside either. The rest are probably asleep. I’ll put on some coffee if you want to wait for Knox to get back.”
“Sounds good.”
We head inside.
The moment the door swings shut, I hear the shower running upstairs.
Under it, Sage’s voice.
“Milo. Come on. I need you to help me.”
I’m halfway up the stairs before I realize I’ve moved. Micah follows.
The bathroom door is cracked an inch. Heat leaks through the gap, carrying the smell of soap and blood.
I push it open.
The shower curtain is drawn and the water is blasting at full. Milo is folded into the far end of the tub, knees to his chest, body shuddering, his hands white-knuckled in his own hair. Water beats against him, washing pale pink into the drain.
Sage is wedged behind him, still fully dressed. She holds him, arms wrapped around his ribcage, pulling him in tight every time his shaking threatens to rattle him apart.
Her eyes find mine immediately. “He won’t move. I don’t know what to do.”
I look at Milo. The loudest man I know, folded up small enough to fit in the end of a tub. This isn’t right.
This isn’t right.
Micah moves past me—smooth, calm. He crouches at the edge of the tub, one hand steady on Milo’s knee and the other on Sage’s shoulder. “It’s Micah, Milo. I’m right here.”
Milo shakes his head, his face streaked with blood and snot. Sage’s shirt is soaked, her knees pressed up to the enamel, fingers curled over Milo’s heart like she could forcibly restart it if she needed to.
I take the space beside Micah—close enough to be there if needed, not so close as to crowd him—and clear my throat. “What happened?”
Sage looks up at me, her face pale and calm. She cradles Milo tighter, rocking him, and speaks so softly I almost miss it.
“He killed them,” she says. “A bunch of Kennel members. Fourteen in total—Tyler’s friends included.”
“Holy fuck.”
Milo lets out an unholy wail, the sound bubbling up out of him like air from a punctured lung. He claws at the shower wall, then at Sage’s forearm, scrabbling for purchase on anything solid.
“I had to,” Milo chokes out, staring at the space between his knuckles so intently it’s like he wants to tunnel through the world and out the other side. “I had to keep her safe. Had to make it stop. I did it for—” He swallows every word after that, looping back to the beginning. “I had to.”
Sage holds him closer, like she could buffer every reactive surge with her own weight. “I know,” she whispers, voice as steady as his is shattered. “I know, Milo. And it’s over now. They can’t hurt me. You protected me.”
He starts rocking, making sharp, jerky inhales that turn into sobs and dry heaves.
The shower beats down, endlessly hot, hissing across his back and turning the air to soup.
Micah tries to wedge himself closer, running his palm up Milo’s shin and into the joint of his knee, doing what he always does—shoring up the edges, knitting people together where they’ve splintered.
But it’s not enough. Milo doesn’t even register him.
I move to the faucet, kill the water. The silence crashes down, punctuated by the muffled sobs and the tremor that runs through Milo’s spine.
“Milo,” I say, as gently as I can. “Can you look at me?”
He doesn’t look up. He keeps his eyes locked on the blinding white of the tub, and the next sound out of his mouth is a joyless little laugh, wrung clean of humor.
“It’s never over,” he says, voice almost a whisper. “Never, never, never, never—”
Sage glances up at me, her hair plastered wet to her scalp, her eyes wide and hollow in a way I’ve never seen before. She shakes her head. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispers again.
“How long has he been like this?” I ask.
“Forever! Always!” Milo shouts before he starts muttering again under his breath.
“Since we got home,” Sage says. “He was covered in blood and crying. I brought him home in Eli’s car—he’s still at the funeral home with Knox—and I thought a shower would calm him down. But . . . ”
We all exchange worried glances. Then I grab a towel and drape it over his shoulders.
“We need to get you out of this tub.”
He doesn’t resist when Micah and I lift him.
He doesn’t help either. His head lolls against my shoulder, arms floppy at his sides.
It takes all the strength Micah and I have to get him out of the tub and onto the bathmat.
Micah sits behind him, arms around his chest, holding him the way you hold someone who’s hypothermic.
Body heat and contact and the steady rhythm of another person’s breathing.
My chest seizes.
I don’t know what to do.
I always know what to fucking do.
Fuck!
“Holden.” Sage holds out a hand for me to help her up.
Thank God. Something useful.
I help her out of the tub and peel off her wet clothes, wrapping her in a robe for warmth. The moment she’s dry, she’s crouching on the floor beside them, her hand on Milo’s knee, thumb tracing slow circles.
All I can do is stand there, looking at them and feeling useless.
How do I even fix this?
My mind races.
“We need help,” I say.
I don’t wait for agreement. I grab my phone and step out onto the landing, half wet and still breathing open-mouthed to clear the steam from my lungs. I stare at the screen for a long moment, because what I’m about to do feels like pulling a fire alarm—necessary and irreversible.
I dial.
It rings four times. Five. I’m expecting voicemail when the line clicks.
“Holden Cross?” Gloria’s voice is sharp and fully awake despite the hour. “My son had better be breathing.”
“He is. But . . . he needs you, Gloria. I don’t . . . Something happened.”
Silence. Then a rustle of movement.
“How bad?” she asks.
“Bad. He went out tonight and—did something extreme. And now he’s crashed.
Hard. He’s flipping between babbling nonsense and being nonresponsive.
We’ve got him on the bathroom floor right now.
But he isn’t talking anymore and he can’t support his own weight.
I don’t want to call an ambulance, but he needs help. ”
“I’ll be there in forty minutes,” she says in a rush. Then she hangs up without saying goodbye.
I stare at my phone. “I didn’t give you the address.”
It takes Gloria thirty-one minutes. In that time we manage to get Milo out of the bathroom and into his room—made easier by the fact he has two mattresses smashed together on his floor.
“Where is he?” Gloria doesn’t ring the bell. She doesn’t knock. I hear nothing from the street, but thirty-one minutes after hanging up, she’s inside my house and she’s calling out.
“Up here,” I call from his open doorway. My voice catches a little, but I steady it.
Fuck. We can’t lose him.
She rushes up the stairs and when she steps onto the landing, her eyes are wide and worried.
She’s in her nightgown, a flannel number with red poppies, and over it a woolen coat.
She smells like eucalyptus and lavender.
Her dark hair is pinned around curlers, a scarf tied over her head.
Her bare feet are shoved into battered Birkenstocks.
She breezes past me, planting a flat hand on my chest as she pushes into the room.
“Oh, my baby,” she says, and the tenderness in it is so raw, so completely at odds with everything I know about this woman—the shock collars, the suspicious garden beds—that it hits me like a fist.
“Mom?” The first word he’s said since we got him out of the tub.
She’s at his side in a blink, sliding onto the mattress and pulling the blanket tight around his shivering body.
“Shh,” she murmurs, brushing his wet hair from his face. “It’s all right. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.” She gathers his head into her lap, cradling him with both hands, and starts humming—not a song, exactly, just a low note, some private animal frequency.
Milo shudders so hard it vibrates Gloria’s thighs.
He clutches at her coat, burying his face in flannel, and all at once the grief breaks open.
He sobs loud, wracking, ugly. The sound is not Milo.
It’s the kid he used to be, the one who survived by outshouting the future.
Gloria rocks him, brushing his hair with her fingers, thumb tracing small patterns into his scalp.
“My poor boy,” she whispers, releasing his hair and touching the backs of her fingers to his hot cheek. She reaches into her pocket and—
Jams a syringe into the side of his neck.
“What the fuck—” Sage lunges forward, but Micah catches her arm.
“It’s okay,” Gloria says. She pulls the needle out, caps it, and tucks it into her coat pocket like it’s a set of car keys.
“It’s diazepam. Same thing they’d give him in an ER, except I don’t make him wait four hours in fluorescent lighting while some twenty-two-year-old resident Googles his symptoms.”