Chapter 189 189

Chapter 189 189
Lucian's POV:
I heard her leave. Emma, on the other side of the door, getting up from the floor, her footsteps going down the hall, down the stairs. Kaelen's voice, low, something I couldn't hear. The front door opening and closing. The car starting.
Then nothing.
My room was dark because I'd pulled the curtain closed when I came in and the only light was the red standby on my gaming monitor and the thin line under the door where the hall light leaked through. I was on the floor. Still dressed in the clothes Kaelen had brought, jeans and a T-shirt, clean, but I could still feel the blood on my arms even though I'd washed them. I'd washed them at the lumber yard with water from a bottle in Kaelen's car and then again in the bathroom and the blood was gone but the feeling wasn't.
I don't know how long I sat there. Time did something weird after a while, stretched and compressed, and the standby light was always red and sometimes I heard the house creak and sometimes I heard Kaelen moving downstairs and mostly I heard nothing.
The facility... I kept going back to the facility. Fifteen. The building collapsing. The tail, the sweep, two guards against a wall, sitting after with my hands in my lap and not understanding what they'd done. I was a kid then. It was noise and chaos and survival and I never had time to look at it straight because we were running and you can't examine what you did while you're still running.
But I wasn't running anymore. I was sitting on a floor in a dark room and there was nowhere to go and the memory of the third man's face was right there, every time I closed my eyes. The fear on it. The way his body understood what was coming before his brain did.
I could still feel the impact in my hand. The one that had been a claw. The give, the crunch, the way his body moved when it hit the brick. That was going to be there forever. I knew it the way you know certain things: this is permanent. This is who you are now.
I spent days like that.
Mom left food outside the door. I ate some of it. Not enough. She made the garlic chicken on the second day, the one she always made when someone in the family was going through it, and I ate half a piece cold off the plate at two in the morning sitting on the floor.
Dad came up on the second day. Sat outside my door for two hours. Talked. About the facility, about the five years, about what they'd done to survive. About the things you carry that don't get lighter. I didn't answer. I heard every word and I didn't answer because I didn't have words. The words were somewhere else, in the part of me that was still a person, and that part was locked in a room inside a room and I couldn't get to it.
Marcus came on the third day. Ten minutes. He said something about choices and consequences and living with both and then he left.
Marlen was different. Marlen didn't sit outside the door and talk. Marlen slid notes under it.
The first one said: "if you don't shower soon I'm calling the health department. Not a threat. A promise."
The second one: "Mom made the garlic chicken. If you don't come down I'm eating your share AND I'll tell Emma about the thing from eighth grade."
I don't know why, but the eighth grade one got me off the floor long enough to eat the whole plate. Some things work that aren't supposed to.
I showered once. Stood under the water until it went cold and then stood under the cold water because the cold felt like something other than the numbness and I needed to feel something that wasn't the memory of impact.
Emma came every day after class. I heard her. She didn't knock after the first time. She just sat out there, her back against the wall, and sometimes I heard her phone buzz and sometimes she sniffed once like she was trying not to cry and sometimes there was just the sound of her breathing on the other side of the door and I sat on my side listening and I wanted to open it and I couldn't because my hands had killed three people and I was not putting those hands on her.
On the fourth day the knock was different. Small. Low on the door. Tiny fist.
"Lucian? It's me. It's Evie."
My chest did something I wasn't ready for.
"I know you're in there because your big brother said you won't come out and that's silly because you can't stay in your room FOREVER, that's what Mom says when I don't want to go to school."
Nothing from me. I was looking at the door.
"I brought you something."
A piece of paper appeared under the gap. Folded in half. Purple and orange crayon, I could see the color through the fold. It slid across the floor and stopped a foot from my knee.
I picked it up. Opened it.
A dragon. Purple with orange spots, messy wings, a tail that went off the edge of the page. At the bottom, in huge uneven crayon letters: SPARKELS IS BRAV.
Ten seconds. Twenty. My hand was shaking. The paper was shaking.
Then I opened the door.