EMBER’S POVI sit beside his bed. Knox sits beside me. His hand finds mine, and his thumb traces circles on my knuckles. The motion is slow, rhythmic, and grounding in a way that I need more than I’m willing to admit.In that room, I tell Knox everything. The arrows, the plan, Queenie going for the gun, the man who grabbed her, firing the shot, Harrison’s men breaching the house. Harrison walking past me like I was nothing.Maurice in the doorway. The speech. The knife. The gunshot. Gale dying chained to a pipe. Harrison’s last words. The trigger pull.I tell it flatly, in order, like I’m reading it off a list, because the emotions are too big to attach to the words right now, and the mechanical delivery is the only way I can get through the sequence without breaking again.Knox listens without interrupting. When I finish, the silence is the kind that absorbs rather than demands.“The flash drive is neutralised,” he says, and I can hear in his voice that he’s giving me something good
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