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Chapter forty-seven

Levana

Every nerve is screaming.

My arms are shaking.

With rage. With fear.

The pulsing pain in my elbow is so sharp I gag on it.

I brace it against the cold steel of the embalming table whilst my other arm cradles my bump, trying to shield them from this. From him. From my poor decisions. From everything.

Patrick’s pacing. Back and forth. Back and forth. Like he’s trying to carve a trench straight into the linoleum.

He’s not even here anymore. Not really. There are just pieces of him, tiny glimpses. The rest is scattered all across the floor.

How the hell did I end up here?

How did I end up like this?

Pregnant. In pain. Trapped in a room full of chemicals and cold metal with the man I love completely broken apart in front of me.

He comes to a halt and turns, red-rimmed eyes landing on me.

When he starts to move toward me again, I panic and scramble around the table, knocking over a tray of tools with a metallic clatter.

He flinches at the sound, but keeps coming.

“Baby,” his voice cracks. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. Please forgive me, beautiful girl. Please.”

He reaches towards me with trembling hands and I snap.

“Get the fuck away from me, Patrick!” I shout, my voice cracking, sharp and guttural, full of something I didn’t know I had left.

“No, baby, no, please—”

“No!” My voice shakes. My vision shakes. My whole body shakes. “I said no.”

My legs want to collapse beneath me, but I stand my ground, even as hot tears track down my face.

“Levana. My beautiful girl. Come on, just—just hold me. Please. Let me hold you .” He steps closer, hands raised in surrender. “God, you’re so beautiful. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. Mara just keeps pushing and pushing and I think they’re going to take you away and I—I’m so scared.”

His voice cracks on the last words.

For a second, he doesn’t sound like Patrick.

He sounds like a little boy, lost and unravelling.

But I can’t let it break me. I can’t. I’ve got enough guilt already searing through my flesh. So I shake my head, slow and sure. “No, Patrick. I’m not doing this anymore. I’m sorry. I’m not.”

His hands drop to his sides and his eyes narrow. “You want to leave me? After everything I’ve done? After how hard I’ve tried?”

He has tried hard. But for the wrong things. For the wrong reasons. I want to yell at him. I want to sob into his chest. I want to tell him I love him. I want to marry him. I want to hold our babies together. I want to run. I want to flee. I want to scream. I want out.

“Lev? Levana! Are you here?! I got your message! Lev?!” A voice calls.

Blinding, dizzying relief crashes through me so violently I almost collapse.

I’d managed to remember his number, dial it on the landline as quickly as I could, said something so he knew it was me.

It fucking worked.

“Shit.” Patrick’s voice spikes. “He’s here. He found us.”

He bolts across the room, grabbing a metal chair from the corner, slamming it under the door handle so no one can get in. “Baby, please—hide. You have to hide! Before he takes you—”

“Elliot!” I shout, my throat tearing on his name. “I’m here! In the embalming room!”

Patrick freezes.

He doesn’t speak. Just stares.

At me.

Through me.

Then his face shifts. Not all at once, but slowly. Piece by piece.Like he’s trying to understand what just happened, but the meaning keeps cutting deeper the longer it sits there.

“Why?” he breathes.

His voice isn’t angry. It’s hurt. Broken and small.

“Why would you do this, Levana?”

I back away from him.

“Why?” he says again, voice breaking. “Why would you do this to me? I lost so much, Levana. My wife. My children. And now you—you’ve done this. I trusted you. I gave my heart to you. You’re taking it all away again. I never did anything wrong. I was so good to everyone. And it still wasn’t enough. Everyone dies or leaves. Fuck, I haven’t done anything wrong. Why?”

My pulse pounds behind my eyes. I want to crumble under the weight of his words. I want to tell him he’s right. That I’m sorry. That I’ll fix this.

But I can’t. I was stupid. So fucking stupid.

“I know, Patrick,” I say softly, voice wavering. “I know you. I know you only ever want what’s best. But you’re sick. You’re not well.”

“I’m fine,” he snaps.

“No,” I whisper, barely able to say it. “No, Patrick. You’re not.”

I take a shaky step forward.

“You dug up your family,” I say as gently as I can, trying to soften the inevitable blow. “You brought their bodies into your house. You dressed them, talked to them, treated them like they were still alive.”

He flinches. His face crumples.

“You stalked me. You took away my control without me knowing. You forced this pregnancy onto me.”

“No—” he breathes, shaking his head.

“You made me think my best friend was a pervert, just so you could keep me to yourself. You smashed my phone. You locked me in your house. You wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom by myself,” I press a hand to my sternum, trying to keep my chest from cracking under the pain. “Patrick, you locked me in rooms with their bodies.”

Hot, salty tears slip free as I take another step forward.

“I love you. I love you so much it hurts. But this right here? This isn’t love. This is sickness. And if you don’t let me go, if you don’t let me out of this, you’re going to kill me, Patrick. You’re going to kill all three of us.”

“Lev!” Elliot shouts, banging on the door. “Are you barricaded in?! Is Patrick with you?!”

“Yes!” I yell, voice shaking around each word. “And yes!”

Patrick’s starts shaking his head, violently. “We’re fine. Me and you. We’re fine. We’re fine. We’re fine.”

“No,” I say softly. “Patrick, we were fine. Before all this. But even then, it wasn’t really fine was it?”

He flinches like I’ve punched him, and he takes a step back, his whole body trembling.

“Patrick…” I shake my head, eyes brimming. “We’re in a funeral home right now, because you want to steal organs so your dead son will talk to you.”

He sways on his feet like I pulled the floor out from under him.

“But I love you,” he whispers. “And you love me. And we love Hattie and Milo. So everything’s fine.”

God.

I press a hand to my mouth, trying not to sob again. He means it. He’s not pretending. I know he loves me. But that doesn’t make this okay. Doesn’t make a single thing about this situation sane or fine.

“I do love you, yes,” I murmur through the tight knot in my throat. “And of course we love the babies. But you need help. Real help. Not from me. Not from the dead. From someone who can actually fix this.”

His eyes are glossy, red veins running through the white like spiderwebs.

“I’m so sorry I let it get this far. I am. I enabled all of this. I kept going along with it, I gave you hope, and I shouldn’t have.” Tears stream freely now, hot and helpless. “I’m so fucking ashamed of myself.”

He shakes his head, stepping toward me again.

“No,” he breathes. “No, don’t say that. You—you helped me. You understood. You got it. You got what I was doing.”

“I’m sorry. I really am. But I was scared. I still am,” I admit, clutching my bump, trying to steady my heart rate. “I let myself get sucked into it because I wanted to help you. Because I love you. But I can’t anymore, Patrick. I can’t.”

“Lev, open the fucking door!” Elliot shouts from the other side.

Patrick jerks around, wild-eyed.

“Shut up!” he roars at the metal. “She’s MINE !”

Then he turns back to me—something shifting in his face.

Something dark.

“You were mine. You said you loved me,” he snarls, voice rising into something unhinged. “You said you’d help me fix him. You said we were a family.”

“Patrick, stop—”

“I’m not sick. Am I sick? No. No I’m not sick. You lied! You’re a liar, Levana!”

He grabs my arm and yanks me to him. Pain explodes through my body again and I scream, stumbling forward.

“Patrick, stop it! Let go of me!”

He doesn’t hear me.

Or maybe he does—maybe that’s the point.

Because he’s shouting over me, spitting every single word like venom, eyes stretched wide and gleaming with something manic. Something electric. Something dangerous.

“You want to ruin everything!” He yells. “You want to take my babies, just like she did. Just like she fucking did!”

His face is red, flushed with fury, and there’s a web of vessels bulging in his neck that look like they might pop at any second. His breath punches against my cheek, thick and heavy, every syllable blistering hot with betrayal.

“You ruined it, Levana! You rui—“

I flinch back violently as he coughs on his words, spraying wet, hot spit across my face.

His expression drops like a mask slipping.

His jaw hangs slack, fury draining from him in a blink, eyes blown wide with something new. Something hollow.

His brow furrows as his gaze travels down. “B-baby?”

I follow, and the world tilts.

Everything slows to a crawl.

Because the trocar’s clutched in my hand.

I hadn’t even felt it. I don’t even remember—

But it’s there.

Long. Silver. Buried deep, right below his clavicle, the shaft trembling with the force of his breath.

Blood spreads fast, soaking into the front of his shirt like ink dropped in water, dark and warm and too much, blooming and unstoppable.

Another horrible, rattling cough rips through him, and more blood oozes out, thick and foamy, tinted pink with air and panic.

It sprays from his mouth, splattering my cheek, my neck, running in thin rivers down his quivering chin.

My breath catches and my eyes climb slowly, dragging themselves up from the glint of silver and spreading crimson, until I meet his gaze.

Hazel. Wide. Glassy.

Still beautiful, even now.

“Baby…” he whispers, so soft I almost miss it.

He drops, his body slumping forward with dead weight.

I’m not strong enough to catch him, but I try, arms locking around him in an attempt to soften his fall.

But it’s awkward and clumsy, and we collapse together.

My knees slam into the floor, jarring up through my bones, but I don’t feel it.

All I can feel is him.

Heavy and still.

His head falls into my lap, like this is some twisted echo of all the times he laid there before, smiling up at me with love in his eyes, and a mouth free of blood.

But now his lips are parted, glossy with red, and the warmth that soaks into my thighs isn’t love—it’s fear, it’s danger, it’s mania, broken hearts, and a shattered future all in one.

The trocar’s still jutting from his chest, catching the light like something sacred, or profane. A cruel little monument marking the lives that have been broken.

A marker on a grave no one meant to dig.

And I can’t look away.

I should pull it out. I should scream. I should do something.

But all I do is sit there, shaking, as his blood keeps coming.

“I just wanted…” he gurgles. “I just wanted our family to be whole.”

His eyes roll slightly, blinking slow, struggling to stay focused.

“I wanted to be their daddy,” he whimpers. “I wanted to be your husband.”

A tear spills from the corner of his eye. And another. And another.

I shake my head, clamping my teeth together, breathing hard as I rock us back and forth, willing all my fucking mistakes to disappear, to vanish through the walls so we can just be happy again. Or something close to it.

”Hey, hey… You’ll get through this,” he sobs. “Even when it feels like you won’t. E-even when you’re so tired you can’t… see… straight. Just, keep m-moving. One step at a time.”

The words hit me like glass to the lungs.

Those words.

Those words.

The ones I gave him at his son’s funeral.

The day this whole thing started.

You’ll get through this. One step at a time.

And now he’s giving them back to me, trying to console me, as the last bit of light dies in his tired, hazel eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” he says on a slurred whisper as his hands reach for my belly. “I’m so… so sorry. I love you, Levana. I love you.”

I guide his hand to the place where our babies are growing—where everything we’ve made lives quiet and small beneath my skin.

And as his fingers settle there, I think of all the things they’ll never get to know.

The softness of his laugh.

The warmth of his arms.

The way Patrick Dalton loves with everything he is, even when it’s all wrong.

“I love you, I’m sorry too,” I choke out.

But it isn’t just love.

What I feel for him runs bone deep—woven into the parts of me I can’t unmake.

It lives in the marrow, in the quiet spaces between who I was and who I’ve become.

It aches.

And it owns me.

My entire soul breaks in two.

I bury my face in his hair, chest heaving as great, big, body-wracking sobs claw their way out of me.

Everything hurts. Every inch of me aches.

I barely register the first sharp crack of metal groaning under pressure.

Then the screech of the door jolting in its frame, the chair beneath the handle straining with the force.

“Lev! Lev!”

Elliot.

But I can’t move.

All I can do is hold Patrick.

Cradle what’s left.

Because this—this broken, bleeding, dying man in my lap—he’s still him.

Under everything he did, he’s still the guy from the memorial garden on that cold, autumn afternoon.

The guy who won me a stupid pink dinosaur, and sucked at skee-ball, but lit up when I laughed at him.

The one who lived for watching me wear his sweaters.

The one who stared into my eyes as we slow danced to his vintage music.

The one who held my hand like it was a lifeline.

Who kissed me like he was memorising my soul.

Who looked at me like I was the only thing on this earth that mattered.

Like I was everything.

Even now— especially now—I see him for what he really was.

Not the madness or the mistakes, or the fear that drove him.

The man who only ever wanted to be good.

And I never wanted it to end like this.

Not with blood on my hands and silence in my lap.

Not like this.

But it had to.

For Hattie.

For Milo.

For me.

So I stay there, rocking gently like I can keep him warm, like I can travel back in time and protect him from every single thing that already happened to him.

And I whisper his name one last time, soft and broken, into the air between us—

Then close my eyes.

And let him go.