I can see you

Chapter 35

( EDWARD'S POV)

He didn’t turn around. Killan just stood there at the landing, his posture too casual for someone who’d vanished for weeks and left wreckage in his wake.

Killian’s cardigan hung loose around his frame, the same damn cardigan he wore to every session like it was part of the uniform for people who pretend to fix you. His hair looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, or like he never slept at all.

“You always were the last one to show up,” he again, more softly this time.

I didn’t move. Honestly, I had imagined this moment too many times. Replayed it like a loop in my head with every variation of violence and vindication I could conjure. In all of them, I made him pay. I made him kneel. I made him understand what he’d broken. But now that I was here, now that his back was really in front of me, casual and unguarded, my hands were shaking. Not with fear but with betrayal.

The kind of betrayal that rots slow. That sneaks in like a splinter and festers until your blood turns against you. The kind that doesn’t make you want to scream, it makes you want to stop. Stop believing in people, stop hoping, stop pretending that the one person who saw you at your worst might still be someone worth holding on to.

The gun hung at my side, forgotten, like a childhood toy you’ve suddenly grown too old for. I didn’t need it. Not yet, not until I understood why. Why he’d done it. Why he’d pretended to be the only one who could handle me, who could keep me from turning into a monster. Why he sat across from me for years, listening, guiding, and waiting, waiting while I bled into his carefully arranged little theory.

All those nights I called him because I was afraid I’d go too far. All those mornings he told me I hadn’t. And now I saw it. All of it. Not as compassion, not as loyalty but as architecture. He’d been building me. Mapping me like a maze. And the part that hurt most? I let him.

I chose to trust him. I told myself he was different. That even if the world hated what I was, he didn't. That Killian saw the whole of me the raw, the broken, the violent and didn’t flinch. But he hadn’t accepted me. He’d used me. And suddenly, I wasn’t sure what I was more furious at him or myself. For letting him in. For needing him at all.

“How long?” I asked. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

He glanced over his shoulder, just enough to meet my eyes.For a split second, the shadows shifted and I didn’t see Killian at all. I saw Roy. The angle of his shoulders, the curl of his mouth that was not smug now, just soft and familiar. The cardigan looked like something he used to steal from our father’s closet. My breath caught. “Roy?” I whispered, before I could stop myself. The word tasted like ash. Like hope dragged out of a grave. And for that moment, I believed it. That maybe Roy had survived, that maybe he was here to stop me from doing something I couldn’t take back. But the illusion shattered when Killian turned and all I saw were his eyes that were empty and knowing. Not Roy. Never Roy.

Killan's face was calm. Too calm like he was waiting for me to catch up to something. “Since the beginning.” He whispered.

I stepped closer and the floor creaked under my weight. The walls here smelled like mildew and lilac, faint but present. Always lilac. A ghost of Rosy’s mother. A detail that wasn’t an accident.

“Why?” I asked. Not just about the maze, or the recordings, or the lies. About everything. About how he could look me in the eye and call himself my friend while pulling every string behind my back.

“Because I wanted to know,” he said but the way he said it wasn’t clinical. It was personal. His voice didn’t have the crisp detachment he’d always worn like armor. Instead, it sounded almost tired and something close to fond.