Page 143 of Ghost Ribbon

It felt like my heart was being crushed. Like someone had reached into my chest and closed their fist around the muscle and squeezed.

All I could do was exist in the pain. “Marco! Marco, please, talk to me, what’s wrong, what do you need—” Rei’s voice was distant.

Fading.

Like he was speaking from the end of a long tunnel, the words reaching me through layers of water and static and the growing roar of a body that was shutting down.

I heard other sounds.

Dimitri’s voice. “What happened?”

“I don’t know…he just…he fell, he’s not breathing right, Dimitri, he’s not…call an ambulance.”

I heard Dimitri’s footsteps moving closer, felt a large hand press against my forehead, then my cheek, then the side of my neck where my pulse lived.

Everything was fading.

“Al-exei.”

I uttered his name. Broken in half. Split down the middle. Delivered in two pieces.

Then I lost consciousness.

I always believed in the light.

I always believed there was something behind the dark, something bright,

something that would poke through eventually if you looked hard enough.

But as the dark took me,

I didn’t see any light.

I just saw him.

Green eyes.

Chapter 34 - Alexei

I let him go alone.

That was the thought that wouldn’t leave me. That was the thing that had taken root in my chest the moment I received Dimitri’s call.

He said he wanted to spend some time with Rei.

He said he felt guilty.

So I let him.

Why the fuck did I let him?

I shouldn’t have, because now I was here, rushing through hospital doors.

I was already broken. Snapped, like a wire under too much tension, the last thread of composure I had been maintaining since the phone call severing cleanly and leaving nothing but directionless rage.

I felt like killing everyone in here.

And no, it wasn’t a figure of speech. I felt an impulse to do violence to every single person in this building because why the fuck weren’t they struggling? Why wasn’t it one of them in pain like Marco? Why did it have to be him?