Page 76 of Last Hand

Not even with pain.

With grief so consuming it feels like I’ll never breathe again, like it’s punched a hole straight through my chest and left it there, gaping and raw. A wound that’ll never scab over because it isn’t justgrief. It’s shame. It’s guilt. It’s too much all at once, and I don’t know where to put any of it.

I thought I knew what hate was. I thought I knew whatshewas. For years, I hated my mother for abandoning us. For leaving me behind. For vanishing into the night and taking the best parts of my father with her. I blamed her foreverything, for Emma’s health, for Dad’s quiet sorrow, for every sleepless night where I wondered why I wasn’t enough to make her stay.

And none of it was true.

None of it.

She didn’t abandon me. She saved me. She saved all of us. And now she’s gone, and I don’t know what to do with the hatred that’s still burning in my chest like an old fire that doesn’t know how to die out.

How do you live with the fact that the person you resented most died for you?

How do you hold the weight of that kind of love when all you ever gave in return was coldness?

I hated the woman who was bleeding for me behind closed doors. I hated her while she was breaking herself in secret, hiding my sisters in the walls away from monsters, loving them the way she couldn’t love me—not because she didn’t want to, because she never had the chance.

And the worst part?

I still don’t know how to grieve for her.

How do you mourn someone you spent most of your life cursing under your breath? I want to go back andscreamapologies. I want to tell her I’m sorry for believing she was weak. For thinking she was selfish. For hating her for being the gravity that my father couldn’t shake, the ghost he never stopped loving. I resented her because she had that power over him.

And the only acknowledgment she ever got from me was hate.

Everything she did was to protect us. Maybe those earlier years not so much. She said she was clean for Emma, that it was too late the damage was done.

She gave them everything because she couldn’t give it to us. She gavemea chance to survive without her, and she gavethemthe parts of her that survived without me.

And now she’s gone, and I don’t know what’s left inside me that isn’t broken or full of rage.

It’s not just grief for her.

It’s grief for the life I thought I had before all this. Grief for the version of me that didn’t know the difference between captivity and care.

I used to rail against my cage. I thought Leone and Milo were my captors. That I was being punished for surviving. I didn’t realize until I was chained by Mikhail what real captivity looked like. What truehelplessnessfelt like. And to think my mother endured him for years.

Mikhail’s version of a prison is the kind that strips you down to your bones and makes you beg. Makes youwishfor the prison you thought you escaped.

Now I know that deal I made with Leone, that bargain, my life for theirs, it wasn’t a sentence.

It was freedom. I just didn’t know how to see it, then.

It was the first time in my life I wasn’t responsible for someone else’s well-being.

No Emma. No Dad. No constant terror of what might happen if I failed again.

For once, I wasn’t a caregiver. I wasn’t the glue. I wasn’t the one holding the damn walls from caving in around us.

I was justme.

And I didn’t know how to exist like that.

I was so used to being someone else’s tether, someone’s protector, someone’sreason—I didn’t even know who I was without that weight on my shoulders. I’d been carrying a mountain for so long, the absence of it felt like falling.

I thought I was free when I was suffering. I thought being needed made me whole. It turns out, being seen made me whole. Leone saw me, even when I hated him. Milo listened, even when I screamed. They made space for me, not Fallon-the-carer, not Fallon-the-sacrifice, justme. The woman who forgot she was allowed to want anything. Allowed to feel safe. To feel loved. To feel like she mattered outside of what she could give.

And now it’s all slipping away again.

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