I can see you

Chapter 36

(EDWARD'S POV)

We didn’t speak on the drive back. The silence was a familiar one. It was not cold, it  just felt final. I glanced at her once, and for a second it felt like that other drive months ago, when she’d first told me about Roy and the juice and the drawer. The air then had been just as heavy but there’d been something else back then too. There was a flicker of hope or maybe defiance, like we still thought we could rewrite the ending if we just bled hard enough for it.

I wondered stupidly, what would’ve happened if we’d never tried to get the truth back. If we’d let the past rot quietly. If we’d never gone looking for Killian or never chased the ghost of Riya or never peeled back the skin of what we were.

Would we have lasted longer? Lived smaller? Maybe. But maybe people like us don’t get to have a quiet ending. Maybe we were always going to find our way back to the beginning and this time we knew exactly where the road stopped.

Rosy stared out the window like the world outside had become a movie she’d already seen. She didn’t blink much but her eyes tracked the scenery without registering it. I drove like I wasn’t in my body anymore. Just a pair of hands and a foot on the pedal.

There were so many things I wanted to say. I could feel them crowding my chest but none of them reached my throat. So I let the silence wrap around us like fog. We weren’t running anymore and we weren’t healing either. We were just finishing something that began a long time ago without either of our consent.

It started raining around the time we passed the old gas station. The rain was not hard but it was just enough to blur the lights and make the world feel a little less sharp. Streetlights blurred into the windshield and buildings softened at the edges. The road felt like it was folding in on itself. Then the thunder came. Distant at first but then louder like sharp cracks rolling through the sky as if the world above us was tearing open.

And still I could hear him. Killian’s voice. Low, precise and echoing like it had been stitched into the back of my skull.

I always cared for you. Don’t worry, I’ll always be there for you. You did nothing wrong. It happens. You were a wildcard. You were like a rat in my lab. Not a patient but an outcome. Roy didn’t understand you the way I did. You were mine before you were his. He got the easy love. I earned it. You broke exactly when I thought you would. That’s how I knew it was working. You survived, Edward. That made you interesting. That made you mine.

I gripped the steering wheel tighter, until my knuckles ached. The thunder rolled again, closer now, but it didn’t drown him out. Nothing did. Not the storm or the engine. Not even the sound of my own breathing which was getting too loud in the quiet car.

I could still hear them too. The screams.
Not real, maybe but loud. Not the kind that ripped through the air but the kind that lived in the silence afterwards. The kind that never left the walls. Every woman I’d hurt. Every moment I’d tried to rewrite. Their echoes lived here. In this rain. In this car. In me.

“You sure you can drive?” she asked finally, her voice soft and slow, like it had to climb its way out of her chest. “You know the air was drugged, right? I covered my nose when I realised but seeing you I think you breathed in a lot more.”

Her words didn’t land like an accusation. More like concern in disguise wrapped in exhaustion. I kept my eyes on the road, knuckles tight on the wheel. The rain danced on the windshield like static. So I’m not going crazy, I thought. It’s all  just the drugs.

And then a worse thought followed, slipping in like a needle: But what if it’s not all because of the drugs?

“I didn’t know,” I said. My voice cracked, and I didn’t bother fixing it.“I just thought it smelled like that because he… because he wanted to make you think of your mother.”