Page 151 of Lady and the Hitman

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Couldn’t unknow it.

These realizations crashed into me in my dream, the anguish all consuming.

And then suddenly, everything changed.

The floor dropped. The tiles cracked apart. My body dissolved into smoke.

Then, I was outside.

At the nursery.

Except it wasn’t the nursery anymore.

It was a graveyard.

Of plants. Of dreams. Of everything my parents had ever built.

The trees were skeletal. Gnarled, blackened things with weeping bark and brittle limbs. Rows of planters sat overturned, the soil inside them gray and ash-like. The greenhouse had collapsed in on itself, jagged glass glinting like shards of ice.

There were no sounds. No birds. No breeze. Just this sickening silence—thick and wrong and final.

Then I saw my parents.

On their knees in the dirt.

Digging.

Desperate.

Bleeding.

Their hands were raw, fingers split and caked with mud as they clawed at the roots of something long dead. My mother was sobbing—loud, broken cries that echoed through the empty trees. My father beat the ground with his fists, shouting words I couldn’t hear.

I tried to run to them. To scream.

But I was frozen.

Useless.

I watched it all like I was trapped behind glass, banging my fists on the walls of my own mind.

I screamed?—

And woke up gasping.

The scream ripped out of me before I could stop it. A raw, choked sound that left my throat burning. I bolted upright in bed, the quilt tangled around my legs, my entire body slick with sweat.

It was dark.

Still.

It felt like a horror movie, at the part just before everything goes wrong.

I pressed my hands to my face, trying to catch my breath.

My chest heaved.

Tears came before I could stop them.

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