The electricity isn't loud. That's the thing no one tells you.
It doesn't roar. It doesn't announce itself. It just arrives—a white, total seizure that starts at my temples and swallows everything. My jaw locks. My spine arcs. And then it stops, and I'm back in the chair, and the room is exactly as it was, and Catalina is still standing in front of me holding the pen.
'Sign it, Sloane.'
Her voice is patient. Almost kind. Like she's asking me to initial a lease.
I don't answer. My mouth tastes like copper. The wrist straps have cut into my skin and I can feel the raw edges every time I breathe, but I keep my hands still. I keep my hands still because if I move them she'll know how badly they're shaking.
The document sits on the table beside her. Two pages. Clean margins. My name printed at the bottom in neat black type, with a line waiting beneath it. *I, Sloane Wells, hereby relinquish all claims—*
I looked at it the first time. I won't look at it again.
'You're only making this harder on yourself.' Catalina sets the pen down and nods at the man behind me. 'He had a gift. I can see that. But he's gone, Sloane. The work exists now. It belongs to whoever can carry it forward.'
I press my palm flat against my sternum—the only movement the straps allow—and feel my heart still beating there. Uneven. Stubborn.
'It's his,' I say. My voice comes out wrong, scraped and thin. 'It will always be his.'
She looks at me for a long moment. Her expression doesn't change.
'Again,' she says.
---
I don't know how much time passes. The overhead light stays the same. The room stays the same. At some point I stop counting the sessions and just focus on the small fragment of stone in my coat pocket—I can feel it pressing against my hip through the fabric. My father's stone. I hold onto that.
Then I hear footsteps on the stairs.
The door opens.
Arian fills the frame. His eyes sweep the room—the chair, the equipment, the straps at my wrists, my face. I watch him take it in. I watch something move behind his eyes, something that looks almost like horror.
*Here*, I think. *Here is where it ends.*
Then Catalina is beside him.
I don't see her cross the room. One moment she's near the table, the next she's at his arm, and she's crying—the real-looking kind, the kind she produces the way other people breathe—and her voice is low and urgent and I can only catch pieces of it. *Broke in. Attacked me. I didn't know what else to do. I was so scared, Arian.*
He looks at her. Then he looks at me.
I am still in the chair. The burns at my temples are raw. My wrists are bleeding where the straps cut in. I am barely conscious and I am looking directly at him and I think: *He knows. He has to know.*
His jaw tightens. Something closes behind his eyes.
'Vicious,' he says. His voice is flat and certain. 'She's always been obsessive. I should have seen it sooner.'
The word lands somewhere past pain. Past anything I have a name for.
He crosses the room and unstraps my wrists. His hands are efficient. Not gentle, not rough—just efficient, the way he does everything. He pulls me up by the arm and I don't have the strength to resist and I don't try.
Catalina watches us go. At the door, I look back at her once.
Her eyes are dry.
---
He doesn't speak in the car. Neither do I.
I watch the city lights thin out through the passenger window. The highway becomes a county road. The county road becomes something darker, lined with bare trees that reach across the headlights like fingers.
I know where we are before he stops the car.
The cemetery gates are iron, old, left unlocked after visiting hours. He pulls up to the entrance and cuts the engine. Gets out. Opens my door. I don't move, so he takes my arm again and walks me to the nearest bench—stone, cold, set just inside the gate.
He sets me down.
I look up at him. I want to say something. I don't know what. Something true, something final, something that would make him understand what he has just done.
He doesn't look at me.
He walks back to the car, gets in, and drives away.
I watch the taillights until they disappear around the bend. Then there is nothing—just the dark, and the cold, and the silence of the dead around me. My parents are here, somewhere past the tree line. Two weeks in the ground.
I press my hand against my sternum again.
Still beating.
I sit in the November dark with the burns at my temples and my father's stone in my pocket, and I make a decision so quiet it barely sounds like anything at all.
No more.
Not one more word. Not one more tear. Not one more single thing given to people who will only ever take.
The cold settles in around me like a second skin, and I let it. I let it because I know something Arian doesn't know yet.
I am going to survive this night.
And then I am going to burn everything down.
