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“Cassius. Cassius. Don’t—don’t—no!”

My heart twists, just the once.

Not enough for me to kill myself for him.

I haul the door shut.

24

LESSON TWENTY-FOUR

Victoria throws herself at me with enough force my head smacks against the stone. But that is all the fight she has in her. Her other punches are impotent, weak against my chest; her whole body is wracked with sobs, and she is praying, whispering Hail Marys and Petitions, and then a mantra of please please please that slurs together; grief at its rawest, grief that is anger and despair and the urge to claw her skin off, the urge to die to make it end.

I hold myself very still. I don’t feel a thing. I promise. I don’t feel a single thing. Maybe if I listen very closely, I think I can hear Bellamy screaming—enough. That’s enough. Listen to the beating of your own heart. Listen to the life, to Victoria’s panic. She’s still alive. She’s still alive because of me. My eyes drift to Leo. The other man is staring at me, but I can’t parse the expression. Is that admiration? Disgust? A confused amalgamate?

God, what will I do if he can’t bear to look at me anymore?

“Get the salve,” Leo says without looking away from me. The Lins respond with nothing more than silent departure; they sprint off towards the quadrangle, bodies swallowed quickly by the thick night and the sudden onslaught of heavy rain.

The weather feels fitting at this moment. It is freezing and windy, sluicy rain, and I am backed against the stone with a girl collapsing in on herself, saying prayers to a God who has failed me too many times.

“It would have killed the rest of us,” Leo says to placate her. Why is he staring at me? I stare back, unmoving, thinking what are you seeing in me right now? You called for me to stop; would you have left Victoria there, too?

“I hate myself,” Victoria cries, which comes from nowhere. I flinch and look down at her. Fistfuls of my shirt are wrapped up in her palm, and she’s half bent over, crying onto the stone.

“I hate myself. I hate myself. What was I thinking? Why on earth did I— say those things to you. That’s why you left him. Because I—”

She thinks confessing that Bellamy was less than perfect made me condemn the man to death. I have to cut her off before she starts believing this true

“Victoria, no.” I pull her up. She shudders, breathing hard. “I’m sorry. But if I’d waited, I would have damned us all.”

“You don’t know that,” she says, very quietly, and now she’s looking at me the same awful way, like somewhere in my skin is a monster. Like I left him there on purpose.

Then she blinks and puts a hand over her mouth. “Oh God. God. I loved him. I swear it. I promise you, Cass, I loved him, I really did, but he was just so. . .”

I tell myself she isn’t upset with me. That she isn’t scared of me, but of herself. I think Victoria Zaki is happy to be alive.

And I think she is glad it wasn’t her I left behind.

But when she lapses into a deep silence, I find it worse than the crying. Because it gives me a moment for everything to settle into place, for the image of Bellamy reaching for me to solidify. I hear the echo of his pleading.

Cassius? Don’t leave me here.

And my brother, the actual, soft brother I had before we came here, looking at me with tears in his eyes and guts in his hands. Cass, we both know I’m not going to make it.

And I feel myself becoming something I never wanted to be. I feel now what Thaddeus must have felt; a chrysalis, a hardening of the soft body, a necessary shell to grow in. Because if I let myself feel it all, I’ll break. It’s that simple. I will come undone, and then it will have been for nothing.

So I can’t feel this. I can’t feel Thaddeus. Bellamy. The boy who I sent to God with a pull of the trigger.

I can’t feel Leo: his love, nor this new look he gives me.

I am here for my brother. My mother. Myself.

That has to be enough.

“Victoria,” I begin.

She snaps up, suddenly angry. Her eyes are inflamed like a redcurrant has been pressed behind her eyelids. Veins criss-cross in angry havoc, colouring the whites of her eyes. “I dare you to apologise, you bastard. You say those words and I will beat on you until I can’t any longer.”