Page 147 of Fractured Future

Warner is what he’s always been to me—safe. The steady, constant presence of the tide lapping at the shore, regardless of the storm raging above. It doesn’t stop him from providing his love and care.

“I can’t face them,” I hiccup into his t-shirt. “How can I?”

“You don’t have to. Not yet. Not ever if you don’t want to. You owe them nothing.”

“But… They must hate me. I left her behind!”

“You did no such thing.” He gently kisses my hair again. “Did you plan to abandon her?”

“No!”

“Did you want to?”

“God, no. No!”

“Did you laugh as they dragged you away?”

“Fuck… No!”

“Or celebrate in the knowledge that she was left alone?”

Tears continue to pour down my cheeks, resembling an overflowing waterfall.

“N-No. I didn’t do any of that.”

“Then stop punishing yourself for something you didn’t choose. You were both captives. One of you just got lucky and found their way home.”

“B-But it didn’t deserve to be me.” My tiny, broken voice sounds so fucking childlike, it makes me sick.

“But it is.”

His arms tighten further, forming a snake-like coil that refuses to surrender me to the demons trying to drag me into their lair. Warner won’t let me drown. I know he won’t.

As long as he’s holding me, I’ll always come up for air. The same way I did when he held my hand at my mother’s funeral. And the same way I did when he found me in that coffee field, battered and broken.

He’s seen me at my worst. The lowest, most harrowing points of my whole life. No matter what heartbreak I’ve allowed him to see, Warner never judged. He never left. He never stopped caring.

“You were given the chance to escape and begin again,” he says into my hair. “Now look what you’re doing with that chance, Ember. You’re fighting back.”

“H-How?”

“By continuing to live. You’re taking all that pain and evil and doing something with it. You’re fighting for the right people now. I am so fucking in awe of you.”

Those words land the killer blow against my fragile state. My sobs intensify into backbreaking bawls that old, independent me would’ve been utterly disgusted by.

My keening must be audible out in the hallway; I have no idea how no one else has come in, seeking the source. The sound of my animalistic wailing feels deafening in my own head.

“Let it out.” Warner’s lips repeatedly press into my head. “You’re safe with me.”

With the feel of his hand stroking my hair, his quiet murmuring and each breath he draws in expanding against my chest, I find a lifeline. A tiny glimmer at the end of a suffocating tunnel.

And I take it.

Over and over again, I take that lifeline.

I take the strength he’s giving me.

Because if Warner can forgive me—the man who has seen me change into this broken version of myself, leaving my old self behind like a ruined chrysalis—then I can forgive myself too.