The phone buzzed and the world narrowed to a single word: blood.
I don't remember grabbing my keys. I don't remember starting the car. I only remember the road stretching too long, too empty, my foot heavy on the gas and my hands cramping white-knuckled on the wheel. Grace's text sat open on the seat beside me, burning holes in my periphery—at the ER, coughing up blood, don't worry too much—and I kept reading it at every red light, kept trying to parse the spaces between her words for how bad it really was.
Don't worry too much. As if I had any other setting.
The mark on my chest ached with a new kind of emptiness, a phantom throb where warmth used to live. I pressed my palm against it at a stop sign, digging my fingers into the scar, trying to feel anything—some pulse, some warning, some sign that the bond still knew Grace existed. Nothing. Just cold skin and the sickening certainty that I'd done this. That severing Adrial from me had severed something from her too, some protection I hadn't known she had, some anchor I'd ripped away without understanding the cost.
By the time I reach the hospital, my lungs feel scraped raw from breathing too fast, too shallow, like my body has forgotten how to take in air without him there to regulate it. The parking garage swallows my car. I don't lock it. I run.
The automatic doors slide open, and the smell hits me first. Antiseptic. Coffee. Old fear, the kind that lives in hospital linoleum, in fluorescent lights that hum too loud. I nearly trip over my own feet getting to the front desk, my voice coming out ragged, unrecognizable.
"Grace Monroe. She texted me. She's coughing blood. She has a history of cancer. Where is she?"
The nurse's expression shifts at the word cancer, softening into something that makes my stomach twist harder, some practiced sympathy that means she sees this every day, that Grace is just another file, just another scared family member clutching a phone.
"She's being evaluated. Take a breath for me, okay?"
I can't. I can't breathe until I see her, until I put my eyes on her face and know whether I've killed her, whether my desperate bargain and his desperate severance have both carved pieces out of the only person I was trying to save.
"Please," I say, my voice cracking. "Where is she? What room?"
The nurse's fingers move across the keyboard, too slow, too deliberate. I watch the screen reflected in her glasses, willing the information to appear faster. "Room 247," she says finally. "Down the hall, past the elevators, second right."
I'm already moving before she finishes speaking.
The hallway stretches forever, lit in that particular hospital way that makes everyone look slightly ill. I pass rooms with doors cracked open, glimpses of other people's crises—an old man coughing, a child crying, someone moaning behind a curtain. My shoes squeak against the linoleum, too loud, marking my panic for everyone to hear. I check room numbers as I run: 230, 235, 240. The scar on my chest burns with each step, a cold fire that radiates outward, making my ribs ache, making my heart stutter. I keep one hand pressed there, as if I could somehow force the bond back to life through sheer desperation, as if I could summon him back by wanting it badly enough.
242. 244. Almost there.
I burst through the doorway of 247 without knocking, without announcing myself, and the first thing I see is the color of Grace's skin. Too pale under the fluorescent lights. The color of old porcelain, of things that shatter.
She's sitting up in the bed with a blanket around her shoulders, pale but awake, a paper cup of water in her hands. Alive. Alive. The word repeats in my head like a prayer, like a threat, like something I don't deserve to believe.
"Evie," she says, eyes widening. "I told you not to freak out."
I almost laugh. It comes out broken, a sound that tears something in my throat on the way up. "You texted me from the ER and said blood, Grace."
"A little blood," she says quickly, too quickly, the way people talk when they're trying to convince themselves as much as you. "The doctor thinks I irritated something, coughing so hard. They said it's probably an infection. My oxygen is fine. No fever. They already did a chest X-ray."
Probably.
The word should comfort me. Instead, it crawls under my skin and nests there, sharp and alive. Probably isn't definitely. Probably isn't we know. Probably leaves room for all the things they haven't found yet, all the ways a body can betray you while doctors smile and tell you not to worry.
I force myself closer to the bed, my legs unsteady, my hands shaking. Up close, I can see what she's hiding—the tremor in her fingers around the cup, the slight sheen of sweat on her forehead, the way she's holding herself rigid against the pain she's pretending doesn't exist. She's lying to me. She's lying to protect me, the way she always does, the way she did when she was dying and told me she felt fine, told me the chemo wasn't that bad, told me not to cry in front of her.
"I'm fine," she says, reading my face. "Evie, I'm fine. Look at me."
I am looking. I'm looking at her pale skin and her careful posture and the way she keeps glancing at the door like she's waiting for more bad news to walk through it. I'm looking at the evidence of my failure, at the price she might be paying for my desperate attempt to save her, then my desperate attempt to save myself.
The scar on my chest pulses once, a ghost of its old rhythm, and I press my hand against it hard enough to hurt. Grace's eyes follow the movement, curious, concerned. She doesn't know. She doesn't know that I traded my soul for her health, that I gave it away to something dark and beautiful, that I let him tear it back out again because I was too weak to bear the weight of what I'd chosen.
"Probably," I repeat, and my voice sounds strange even to me, hollow and far away. "That's what they said. Probably."
Grace reaches out, her cool fingers finding my wrist, grounding me. "Hey. Deep breath. I'm right here."
But I can't stop seeing her the other way—gray and still and gone—can't stop feeling the empty space where Adrial used to be, can't stop wondering if the bond severed something vital in her along with everything it took from me. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. The hospital smells like fear and false hope. And I'm standing here with my sister's fingers on my wrist, alive and talking and probably fine, and I want to scream because probably isn't enough, because I need certainty, because I've learned that the things you love can disappear in an instant, torn away by choices you didn't understand you were making.
"Evie," Grace says again, softer this time. "You're scaring me."
I want to tell her she should be scared. I want to tell her everything—the ritual, the Fallen, the mark, the severing, the bone-deep certainty that I've broken something I can't see yet. I want to fall apart and let her put me back together, the way she used to when we were children and the world was simpler and the only monsters lived in stories.
Instead, I force my mouth into something resembling a smile.
"Sorry," I say. "You know me. Professional worrier."
She squeezes my wrist. I feel the fragility in her grip, the way her strength hasn't fully returned, the way she's still rebuilding from something that should have killed her.
Probably, I think again, and the word tastes like ash.
The door opens behind us. A doctor steps through with a clipboard and a practiced expression of calm authority, and Grace's hand slips from my wrist as she turns to face whatever comes next. I stay where I am, rooted to the linoleum. I press my hand harder against the scar and wait to learn what my bargains have cost.