Page 94 of The Villains We Make

“Ophelia?” I push hair from her cold face, bring mine to hers, hold her, hold her, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t make a sound. Doesn’t take a single breath.

All she does is bleed. She just bleeds.

37

OPHELIA

The last face I see is Silas’s. The last sound I hear is his. Even the cold doesn’t bother me more than a few moments, not after the tearing, searing pain. But that physical agony, it’s nothing to what I feel when I see Silas’s face. When I hear him say my name over and over again. Because I know what it means.

He’s always rescuing me.

He rescued me in this very pool once a long time ago. The night I fell in love with him.

He would die for me.

I would die for him, too.

Did he know that before? Does he know it now?

I wish I could say it. I wish I could look into his eyes just one more time. Feel his arms around me. Feel the safety of his embrace. That is the agony, that I cannot. That all I can do is watch from above, removed, my body lying still on those blood-stained stones, him trying to make me breathe. Him screaming for me to breathe. His tears falling on my face too late to warm me. Too late.

38

SILAS

It takes four sets of arms to drag me away from her. Four men to haul me off as medics work on her, trying to make her breathe, trying to make her stop bleeding.

Ethan laughs, the sound unhinged and wild.

I look at him. Two men hold his arms behind his back, handcuffs closing around his wrists, the gun on the lawn discarded too late. It’s done its damage.

My arm aches as if my mind just now remembers the bullet lodged inside it. The sound of chopper blades breaks into the night, whipping freezing air and wet snow around us. A stretcher appears out of nowhere and two men lift Ophelia and strap her to it. She still doesn’t move, and when they hurry toward the chopper, her arm slips off the side, helpless. The ring I gave her catches the light.

I need to go to her. I need to go now.

I tear myself away from the men holding me and sprint toward the chopper as they load her on. No one will stop me from going with her. They must see that because a few moments later, we’re airborne. I hold her hand as they put an oxygen mask over her face and someone pumps air into her lungs to make her breathe. I hold her small, freezing hand in mine to let her know I’m here. I’m with her. I’ll stay with her, and I’ll be here when she opens her eyes.

Because she will open her eyes. She has to open her eyes. She has to.

39

OPHELIA

Chaos around me. Sound and movement, shadows and light and pain. Searing, hot pain.

Someone shouts orders and I blink, the bright light above me blinding. I turn my head, and a moment later, the pain bleeds away, numbness a physical thing filling me up from the tips of my fingers and toes into my limbs, my torso, taking me under a veil of nothingness until it’s quiet and dark and still. So still.

I see Hamish. He’s lying in that circle of blood. He’s dead. I know.

Sinistral. The Fox house. The pool. As a little girl, I’d been so excited to see our new neighbors building a pool.

Now all I recall is the freezing water.

He was going to kill Silas.

Silas, who’d come for me again. He’s always coming for me. Rescuing me.

But I slid out from under Ethan’s shoe and this time, I rescued Silas and the bullet ripped into me rather than him.

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