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It’s the worse ones.

Your parents are dead, Nero. It was mercenaries. We have no idea what coward hired them. I’m so sorry…

“Just fucking do it,” I croak. “Please.”

I need this before I unravel completely.

He swears under his breath, clearly hating this. But then he picks up the revolver, his movements clean and efficient as he slips the bullet into one of the six empty chambers, spins it, and racks it shut with a loud click.

My throat works. “Show me,” I say.

He opens the revolver, tilts it just enough to flash the single bullet. Then he snaps it shut again and sets it down on the desk.

“Life is pain,” I murmur. “Sometimes you can’t escape it.”

Kir exhales slowly, shaking his head. “No,” he growls. “Sometimes you can't.”

I pick up the gun and step away from the desk, toward the window. I look out over the vast wooded grounds at the glinting lights of Manhattan.

I feel the world holding its breath with me.

I tighten my grip on the revolver. My pulse is hammering, making my skin ripple like there’s a bomb inside about to rip me open. Everything inside me is wound tight—blood, breath, thought—a prison I can’t escape.

I stare out at the lights, and that’s when the reel starts playing.

My mother’s laugh, echoing down a hallway. The sound of my father pouring his Scotch. The smell of his cologne on my blazer before church.

The blood. The screaming.

The guilt.

I squeeze my eyes tightly closed, my fingers curling around the revolver’s grip.

Through the pain and the ache and the roaring in my head, I think ofMilena.

Her fucking mouth. The way she gasped into the mirror. The way that for a moment, with her, it wasquiet.

Briefly, it felt like freedom from my madness.

But that’s a lie, isn’t it? There is no freedom. There’s no fixing what’s broken in me. Only the noise and the chaos.

The anguished wail that never, ever stops.

It’s back right now, louder than ever. A siren in my head. Awhistle, building to a scream.

I bring the gun up. My hand doesn’t shake as the barrel touches my temple.

Cold metal against warm skin.

Breathe in. Hold. Wait for the final release.

My finger brushes the trigger like a lover.

My arm muscles tense, my jaw clenches, and the lights swim in the darkness of my vision as I squeeze my eyes tightly shut.

Click.

The silence that descends over the room after the snap of the dry-fire—the hammer hitting an empty chamber, and not the single bullet—is deafening.