Page 127 of Dragon 7

“I can’t!”

Until my chest caved in.

Until my eyes watered out the vision of death before me.

“I can’t.”

Until I saw the twins and me dancing together and laughing at the cocktail party and my throat burned as I screamed, “There is no God!”

What God would do that?

What master plan would this be to take them from me? Rip their souls out of my existence when I was barely holding on.

When they were part of the reason why I lived.

My father was dead, but what did it matter now if the twins were gone?

“I can’t!!!”

And then. . . I opened my eyes.

And the twins were there.

Their ghosts.

Standing together in the red emergency light at the edge of the crates, side by side, the way they had stood at the cocktail party in the warm gold light of the ballroom, laughing and shooting bubbles.

Aki on the left.

Yuki on the right.

NO!

My chest broke open, and an ocean of sorrow poured out into the darkness of the cabin, drowning me. The agonizing water rose hot and salt-heavy, filling every chamber I had built to hold myself together.

It found the cracks in my ribs.

It found the dark spaces behind my sternum.

It filled my heart, then overflowed.

And I could not stop it.

I could not breathe around it.

I could not be the man holding it together anymore.

I was the water now, and the water was the pain, and the pain had taken my shape from the inside out until there was nothing left of me that was not made of grief.

My bones turned to riverbeds.

My lungs turned to tide.

And the pain had no bottom.

And. . .I let the water. . .have me. . .

Chapter twenty