035— BLOOD.

His office door was open.

I didn't knock. I walked straight in and he was at his desk and he looked up and something moved across his face — surprise, quickly gone — and then he just looked at me. In my eyes probably. At whatever my face was doing that I had stopped trying to manage somewhere between Elena's room and the corridor.

"What do you know about Crew?" I asked.

He said nothing.

"What do you know about Crew Harding?"

Still nothing.

"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU KNOW ABOUT CREW HARDING VOLKOV."

My voice hit the walls and came back at me and the office went very quiet afterward. 

He stood up.

Came around the desk slowly. Looked at my face the way he looked at things he was evaluating and I stood my ground even when my eyes were burning and my throat was raw from not crying for three hours.

"Calm down," he said. "You need to—"

"You don't tell me what to do," I said. "You tell me what I ask. What do you know about him?"

"And if I don't want to." He stopped in front of me. "You need to be rational Sloane. If you go after Crew right now without a plan you'll—"

"Rational." The word came out like something I was throwing away. 

"All this time I've been rational. Patient. Careful. Staying in your house. Following your rules. Not asking questions you didn't want to answer." My jaw was tight and my eyes were burning and I looked away because looking at him directly right now was too much. 

"What have I got? I'm dying, Kai. I don't have—" My voice fractured on the last word. "I don't have enough time left to keep being rational."

Silence.

I stared at the bookshelf behind him and breathed and told myself not to cry in his office. Not here. Not in front of him.

He stepped closer.

His hands came to my shoulders — both of them, and I was opening my mouth to tell him to get off when he shifted my collar aside.

Just slightly. Just enough.

He looked at the mark.

I watched his eyes.

I watched the thing that moved through them that he didn't manage to contain quickly enough. Something that looked the way Elena's face had looked an hour ago, and I felt it land in my chest like a stone dropping into water.

Not this. I could not do this again.

"Don't," I said. My voice came out shaking. I pulled back from his hands. "Don't you dare—"

The cough cut me off.

One sharp convulsion, stealing the rest of the sentence. I pressed my lips together and pushed past it.

"Don't you dare pity me," I said. "I don't need—"

Another one. Worse. And another. My hand flew up to cover my mouth and the cough kept coming in waves, bending me forward, my whole chest heaving with it, my eyes watering. I couldn't get ahead of it. Couldn't find the space between spasms to breathe properly.

"Sloane?"

I held my free hand up. I'm fine. One second.

His footsteps crossed the room. Fast. A glass pressed into my free hand and I drank without looking and the cold water hit my throat and the coughing slowed, stuttered, stopped.

I stood there.

Both hands over my mouth.

Breathing through my nose until my chest settled.

Okay. Okay it was done. I was just going to lower my hands and look at him and say I was fine and we were going to pretend this conversation had gone differently.

But then, I looked at my hands.

Dark blood.

Not a lot. Just — there. Sitting in my palm against my skin, I stared at it and my brain just stopped.

Blood.

The room was silent.

Kai was in front of me and I could feel him there and I could not look up. I kept my eyes on my palms and the blood sitting in them and air kept catching wrong in my chest. Faster. My chest pulling in air and not knowing what to do with it.

He went very still.

I looked up.

His face.

I had seen Kai Volkov controlled and almost-smiling and stuttering on a staircase. I had catalogued every variation of his face for weeks.

I had never seen him look like that.

I ran.

Not a decision. My feet just went — out of his office, into the corridor, moving fast because standing in that room with blood in my hands and his face doing that was something my body had decided it could not do for one more second.

The corridor blurred.

Blood blood blood.

The word kept firing through my head on a loop and I pressed my hands against my thighs as I walked but I could feel it still, the wetness of it, and my mind went somewhere it had been trying not to go for three months—

The living room floor.

The carpet. The dark spreading stain of it. My father's hand when I touched it. Cold, so cold — and the blood soaking through my jeans.

My mum, at the bottom of the stairs.

Elijah in the hallway.

All that blood.

My knees went.

Not all the way. I caught myself against the wall, one hand hitting the plaster, and I stood there with my shoulder against it and my head dropping while my legs shook and the corridor spun slightly at the edges.

Blood in my hands.

My family in their blood.

I closed my eyes.

Breathe.

Just breathe.

One breath. In. Out.

Another one.

Something warm closed around my side.

An arm. Catching my weight before I'd fully decided to give it.

"Hey." A familiar voice. "Hey. I've got you."

I turned my head.

Niko.

His face doing something that wasn't his usual easy expression.

"Are you okay," he asked quietly.