Page 135 of The Beautiful Dead

His boots crossed the room, stopping just behind me. I felt his heat at my back, his presence settling over me like a second skin. His fingers skimmed the edge of my wrist, a featherlight touch over drying paint.

“Who’s it for?”

“Everyone,” I murmured. “No one.” A beat. “Me.”

His breath was warm against my neck, his voice a whisper against my ear. “What do you need?”

My fingers twitched, aching to return to the brush, to keep shaping the twisted beauty into something more. But there was something else. Something far more urgent.

“We need to go,” I said instead.

Domino stilled. “To Hollow Pines?”

I turned in his arms as they wrapped around me, meeting his gaze. Green, dark, and knowing.

His expression didn’t change, but I saw the shift—the way his jaw tensed, the way his hand flexed on my hip before it relaxed again. He already knew. He alwaysknew.

“Now?”

I nodded. “Now.”

His slow exhale ghosted over my lips. Domino lifted a hand, dragging his fingers down the column of my throat. Possessive. Unyielding.

“Fine.” His voice was quiet, but there was something in it. A promise. A warning. “I’ll drive.”

I didn’t remember getting into the SUV. Didn’t remember the city streets bleeding together in the rain, the neon signs warping into something shapeless and distant.

Didn’t remember walking into Hollow Pines, past the hushed voices, past the pitying glances, past the smell of antiseptic that clung to the air like something rotten beneath the surface.

But I must have walked in the rain because my clothes were wet, the fabric clinging to my skin, heavy and cold. Drops still rolled down my face, trailing along my jaw, slipping past my lips. Water. Maybe. Maybe not.

I stood at the threshold of room 213, staring at mom’s frail form in the bed. She didn’t look like a person anymore.

Her skin was almost translucent, stretched too thin over sharp bones, her arms skeletal against the stark white sheets.Her chest barely moved, the only sign of life coming from the slow, mechanical rise and fall—oxygen forced into her lungs by the intubation tube taped to her lips. But she wasn’tbreathing.Not really. The machine was doing it for her.

She was already gone.

I stepped closer, my movements automatic, like I wasn’t the one controlling my body. I felt nothing. No grief. No anger. No relief. Just… nothing.

The heart monitor beeped, steady and artificial. A hollow rhythm filled the silence between the whispers outside the door.

I stared at her face, searching for something familiar. Some remnant of the woman she used to be. But all I saw was the empty shell left behind.

I thought I’d feel something.

I thought I’d remember. The way she used to hum under her breath. The way her voice sounded when she said my name. The way she held my hand in hers, fingers warm, solid, real.

But there was nothing.

The doctor stood on the other side of the bed, waiting. I didn’t look at him, didn’t acknowledge the presence of the nurses hovering just out of view or Arti where he hovered at the end of the bed.

I reached out, my fingers brushing the back of her hand. Cold. “Goodbye, Mom.”

I said the words people expected to hear, not through conscious thought. My lips just wormed the words as they rolled off my tongue. I exhaled slowly, then gave the doctor a single nod.

He moved immediately, pressing a few buttons, shutting off the machine. The silence that followed was deafening as we waited and watched. We held our collective breath like some miracle of god might happen, but it didn’t.

The heart monitor let out one final, long, unbroken note before the line went flat.

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