Chapter 66 66
Annabeth's POV:
"What happened?" I asked. "In the room. After I passed out."
He was quiet for a beat too long. "Does it matter?"
"Yes."
"I got you out. Marcus helped. The building's been evacuated, they're calling it a gas leak. No civilians hurt." He delivered it like a report, clinical and stripped of detail.
"How many did you kill?"
The silence this time was different: it was much heavier.
"Kaelen."
"Three." He was looking at his hands again, the ones he'd shoved into his pockets and then pulled out and now couldn't figure out what to do with. "Maybe four. I'm not... I... I don't know about one of them."
Three people. Maybe four. For me. This boy who'd let drunk guys beat him up in an empty street rather than risk exposing what he was, who'd healed a dying kid on the street because he couldn't help himself, whose mother had taught him that golden dragons protect, they don't destroy.
He'd destroyed for me...
I didn't know what to say to that. Thank you seemed insane. I'm sorry seemed worse. So I said nothing, just lay there looking at the ceiling while he sat in his chair looking at the floor and the silence between us filled up with everything we couldn't figure out how to say.
The bond was there. Faint, muted, like hearing someone talk through a thick wall. But it was there. His emotions bleeding into mine the way they'd been doing for weeks, except now they were different. Grief and guilt and relief and fear and something fierce underneath all of it that I recognized because I'd felt it too, once, the night I thought he was dying from absorbing my fire and I'd understood with absolute clarity that a world without him in it was not a world I wanted to live in.
"You should sleep," he said finally.
"I just slept for fourteen hours."
"Your body needs—"
"I know what my body needs." I sounded sharper than I meant to. I was tired and scared and powerless and the person I was angriest at in the world was also the person who'd killed for me and I didn't know how to hold those two things in my head at the same time. "Sorry. I didn't mean to snap."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. None of this is fine." I pressed my palms against my eyes. They were dry now at least. "I need to... I need my phone. I have to text Mara. And call my aunt."
"It's three AM."
"Shit." Right. Normal people were asleep at three AM. Normal people weren't lying in safe houses with dragon blood suppressants in their veins. "Okay. Tomorrow then. First thing."
"I'll remind you."
More silence. He was doing that thing with the chair again, shifting his weight, the legs scraping against the floor. Uncomfortable.
"You don't have to stay," I said. "If there's another room or a couch or something."
"There's a couch in the front room."
"So go sleep on it. You look terrible."
He almost smiled at that. Not quite, but close. "Thanks."
"You know what I mean. You're covered in..." I gestured vaguely at all of him. "Everything. Go wash your hands at least. The blood is..." I couldn't finish. The blood was bothering me, not because it was gross but because of what it meant. Every dark stain on his skin was evidence of what he'd done, of how far he'd gone, and I couldn't look at it without my chest doing something complicated.
"Yeah." He stood up and looked at me, and for a second the mask slipped and I saw the full weight of what was behind it. Exhaustion so deep it went past physical, past emotional, into something that looked like a person who'd crossed a line they could never uncross and was still processing the fact that they didn't regret it. "I'll be in the other room. If you need anything, just... I'll hear you. The walls are thin."
"Okay."
He turned to leave and got almost to the door before I opened my stupid mouth.
"Kaelen."
He stopped. Didn't turn around. His back was rigid, shoulders tense, and I could see a tear in his shirt near the left shoulder blade that showed skin underneath. Clean skin, unbroken, because he healed and his body didn't keep records of the violence it went through. Lucky him.
"You saved my life," I said. The words felt heavy coming out, like they weighed more than words should. "I want you to know that I know that."
He was quiet for a moment. Then, still not turning around: "I'd do it again. Every time. You know that too."
I did know that. That was kind of the problem.
"Goodnight, Kaelen."
"Goodnight, Annabeth."
He closed the door behind him and I lay in the dark listening to his footsteps, the sound of water running in what must've been a bathroom, the creak of the couch as he lay down. The safe house was small enough that I could hear him breathing if I held my own breath, slow and deliberate, the way someone breathes when they're trying very hard to stay calm.
I picked up my phone from the nightstand. 3:17 AM, twelve missed calls from Mara, four texts from Aunt Sarah, and one from Marcus: "Rest. We'll talk in the morning."
I couldn't call anyone at this hour but I could text. I opened Mara's thread first.
"Hey. Sorry I disappeared. Got really sick today, some kind of stomach virus. Can't keep anything down. Probably contagious so don't come over. I'll call you tomorrow."
Then Sarah: "I'm safe. Everything went okay. Stay at Helen's for a couple more days, I'll explain when I see you. Love you."
I put the phone down and stared at the Florida water stain on the ceiling. My body hurt. My fire was gone. I was lying in a dead man's safe house while the boy who loved me washed other men's blood off his hands in the next room.
And the worst part, the part I wouldn't admit to anyone including myself, was that when I'd opened my eyes and seen him sitting there, ash in his hair and blood on his knuckles and his stupid long legs taking up half the room, the first thing I'd felt wasn't anger or resentment or the familiar wall of hurt that had been between us for weeks.
It was relief. Just... relief. Stupid, overwhelming, bone-deep relief that he was there and he was alive and he was still him even after what he'd done.
I turned on my side, facing the wall, and closed my eyes. Through the thin walls I could hear him breathing. Through the bond I could feel him, faint and bruised and unsteady but present.
Still there. After everything, still there.
I pressed my hand against the wall between us and kept it there until I fell asleep.