“Say it again.”
Zee doesn’t. She doesn’t have to. The look on her face is enough...ashen, rigid, eyes too bright like she’s holding back something feral. Snow melts into her hair as she stands in the wreckage of what used to be our safehouse, phone still pressed to her ear like it’s burned there.
“She’s gone,” Zee finally says, voice cracking on the word like it hates her for saying it.
Gone. Gone...for real?
The word doesn’t land right. It floats. It hovers. It refuses to become real.
I step past her.
The door hangs off one hinge, splintered inward. Bullet holes chew through concrete walls like rot. The Christmas lights Luna insisted on stringing along the window blink weakly...red, green, red...mocking. There’s blood on the floor. Smears. Handprints.
Not hers. I'm hundred percent
