Chapter 316: Thirty Minutes
CASSIAN
I turned around then. My face felt like stone, the skin tight and dead. I looked at him standing there in the middle of the hallway, his hair messy from sleep, his eyes wet and wide.
"I can’t—" I started, then the words choked in my throat. I took a breath and started again, keeping my voice very quiet, very even, because if I let it shake, I’d fall apart right on the floor.
"I risked everything for this. For us. For you." I let the silence sit between us, each word coming out heavy and cold like a stone dropped into a well. "And you—" I couldn’t finish it.
Julian just watched me, the tears running down his nose and dripping onto his collar, but he didn’t lift his hand to wipe them away. He just stood there and took it.
"I can’t help it," I said, and the truth of it felt like an iron nail driving into my own ribs.
"I resent it. A little bit. Right now, Julian, I resent you. And I can’t be in this house while I feel like that, because you don’t deserve to have me looking at you like this."
He didn’t move a muscle. The wet lines on his cheeks were shining in the light from the door.
"I’ll come back," I told him, my hand falling off the door frame. "I just need... I need an hour."
I stepped out and pulled the door shut behind me.
The sound of the wood hitting the frame wasn’t loud; it was just a dull, soft thud. That was the worst part of it.
Every time I’d ever left a room in a rage, it had been with a slam that shook the glass, something that felt like a fight. This just felt like an ending.
I got into the car, started the engine, and threw it into gear. I drove down the coast road with my hands locked onto the wheel at ten and two, my eyes staring straight ahead at the asphalt.
I drove fast because I knew if I stopped the car or pulled over to look at the water, I’d have to sit there with the sound of his voice rattling around inside my skull.
I ended up at the same stretch of sand where we’d stood on Sunday.
The water was still that pale, indifferent blue, the small waves rolling in over the pebbles and sliding back down with a low, sucking hiss.
The light was exactly the same as it had been when the old man took our picture, but everything else in the world had gone completely black.
I sat down on a piece of grey driftwood right at the edge of the foam, my boots thrown into the dry sand behind me. My bare feet were cold against the wet pebbles, but I couldn’t feel them.
The only thing I could feel was my own chest, which was tight and shallow, my lungs refusing to take the air in all the way.
I kept trying to take a deep breath, but the air would stop halfway down my throat, leaving me panting like a dog that had been run too hard in the sun.
All I could see was his face when the explanations stopped. I saw the way his eyes went dead, the way the doors closed was nothing left but the dark.
"I know," his voice said in my head, soft and flat against the dirty tiles. "I’m really sorry."
And then the other line came back, the one that sounded like a bone cracking. "Please don’t leave me."
A large wave came in, the cold white foam rising up until it washed right over my ankles, but I didn’t pull my feet back.
I just sat there while the water dragged the sand out from under my soles. I realized then that through every single clean and dirty year we’d spent together... through the cellars in the north, through the nights we’d spent bleeding in the back of vans, through every terrible thing my father or Marceli had ever ordered us to do... I had never once walked away from him.
Not once. I’ve stayed through the blood and the lies, but I’d walked out over a few lines of white powder on a coffee table.
The weight of it hit me all at once, a sudden, greasy sickness that made my stomach turn over.
I stood up so fast I nearly tipped over into the water, my boots dangling from my left hand by the laces.
The car keys were already in my right palm, the metal teeth biting into my skin. I hadn’t been gone thirty minutes, but the hour I’d promised felt like a lie I’d told to a dying man.
I knew the second I’d closed the door that I was never going to stay away. I knew it when he said please.
I’d left him alone because I was a coward who didn’t know how to look at a thing he couldn’t break with his fists.
I didn’t run across the sand, but I moved fast, my bare feet slipping on the pebbles as I scrambled up the bank to where the car was parked.
I threw the boots into the footwell, hit the ignition, and spun the tires on the gravel as I tore back onto the coast road.
The car carried too much speed around the narrow cliffs, the tires squealing against the asphalt on every sharp turn, but I didn’t lift my foot off the pedal.
I needed to get back to the house. He was alone in that room with the powder and the shame, and he’d spent too much of his life being left in empty spaces by people who were supposed to care about him.
He shouldn’t be alone. Not today. I turned the corner onto our narrow street, my hand already reaching out to pull the handbrake, but my fingers froze before they hit the leather.
When you spend your whole life looking for traps, your eyes learn how to read a street before your brain even knows what it’s looking at.
The light was hitting the front of our house at a weird angle, the small white terrace looking too bare in the noon sun.
Then I saw the windows.
The double glass frames of the living room weren’t reflecting the sky anymore. They were gone, replaced by a jagged, black star of empty space where the panes had been smashed completely through.
The shards of glass were scattered all over the gravel turnout, bright and blinking like silver teeth in the dirt. They’d been broken from the outside, pushed in with a heavy boot or the butt of a gun.
The front door was standing open at a crooked, broken angle, the iron latch torn right out of the plaster work.
I didn’t turn the engine off. I didn’t even park the car straight. I slammed my foot on the brake, threw the door open while the wheels were still rolling against the stone, and ran across the gravel with my bare feet cutting into the sharp edges of the broken glass. I didn’t feel it.
The living room was an absolute slaughterhouse. The linen couch had been flipped completely over onto its side, the cushions ripped open and the white stuffing scattered across the floor like snow. The wooden table was split down the middle.
Right in the center of the mess, near the legs of the overturned chairs, Julian’s film camera was lying on the tile. The heavy leather strap had been sliced in two, and the front glass of the lens was shattered into a hundred tiny grey scales.
The metal casing was dented, crushed down as if someone had stood on it with their full weight just to make sure it wouldn’t work again.
The camera he’d held against his chest like a shield on the beach was just rubbish now.
And then I saw the floor near the hallway door.
There was a pool of dark, thick red sitting in the groove between two tiles. It wasn’t large, it was only about the size of a man’s palm, but it was fresh, the surface of it smooth and shiny under the sun from the broken window.
A small pool meant there hadn’t been a long, messy struggle. A small pool meant someone had hit him once, hard, right behind the ear or across the jaw, and carried him out while he was still too soft to scream.
They’d taken him before the high could even leave his blood.
I stood right in the center of the room, my breath coming in short, dry rattles that scraped the inside of my throat. The silence in the house was massive, heavy, the kind of quiet that comes after a bomb goes off and takes the air with it.
I put my right hand out against the white plaster wall, my fingers digging into the rough lime finish until my nails split, not because I was going to fall, but because I needed to touch something that wasn’t moving. My skin was cold.
His voice came back then, not one word at a time, but all of them piled on top of each other, screaming inside my ears until the room seemed to spin around the red spot on the floor.
"Please don’t leave me."
"I know."
"Cassian, please, I can stop."
"Don’t."
I’d left him. I’d given them the thirty minutes they needed to find the house, and I’d walked out the door with his name on my tongue and my back turned to the window.
