Page 97 of The Final Contract
“Hey.”
Stasia’s voice breaks through. She rounds the corner, and when she sees me—sees the state I’m in—her expression softens instantly.
“What happened back there?” she asks gently, crouching down beside me.
I shake my head, wiping at my face uselessly. “She looked like you, Stas. Like us. And I—” My throat tightens. “I couldn’t stop. I kept seeing you on that table. I couldn’t let her go.”
Stasia doesn’t say anything at first. She just sinks down onto the floor next to me and pulls me against her. Her arms are warm, steady, and I bury my face in her shoulder like I used to when we were kids.
“She wasn’t me,” she murmurs into my hair. “She wasn’t you either. We did everything we could.”
“I know,” I whisper, though the words feel like lies.
“We knew we weren’t going to win that one, Sera. But we tried like hell.”
We sit there, pressed together, the only stillness in a hospital that never stops moving.
The curtain whips back suddenly. A harried orderly pokes his head in. “Hey—where’s the patient with the head wound? Guy from the crash?”
Stasia and I both blink. I frown, pushing up onto shaky legs. “What do you mean? He was sedated. There’s no way he?—”
But when I cross the hall into the bay, the bed is empty. The monitors still beep, cords dangling loose. The floor is smeared with footprints, a trail of red leading nowhere.
And on the mattress, where he had been sitting, lies a single rose.
White. Blood-soaked.
I stare at it until my vision blurs again. Not because of him, not because of the strangeness of it being left behind, but because I know—deep down—I can’t do this anymore.
I can’t walk into a trauma room and the patient’s face becomes my sister’s.
Another night like this, and it’ll break me.
After that night in the hospital, Seraphina quit nursing. Said she couldn’t do it anymore—couldn’t look at a patient without seeing Stasia. Couldn’t face another code where all she saw was her sister’s face going slack. She tossed the rose he left behind in the trash, not realizing how significant it would become in her life.
The nurse had sworn he’d only turned his back for a second, prepping sedation, and the bastard was gone. Staff searched; security swept every floor. No sign of him.
And then the drunk—the one with nothing more than a busted arm, the one who killed a woman with his selfishness—turned up dead the next morning. No trauma, no struggle. Everyone thought the hospital missed something, botched the case. There was an investigation, but nothing stuck.
Now it makes sense. Caleb Ward could’ve slipped into his room, found the man who killed his fiancée, and smothered him with a pillow while he slept. Simple. Quiet. Final.
But the story didn’t end there.
Jaxon dug deeper, pulling records nobody else thought to cross-check. Turns out Caleb was picked up hours later, wandering the streets, covered in blood, half out of his mind. EMS logged him as a John Doe and took him to another hospital across town. He got treatment there—but a traumatic brain injury like his doesn’t heal easy, and it’s clear he never got himself much care after.
So, he unraveled. And in that broken place, Seraphina became Sarah.
The one who died on the table while Seraphina pressed the life out of her chest, begging her back. In his head, they fused.
It took him six months to track her down and get a job at the Ledger. And from there, he sank into her shadow—watching, waiting.
The notes came first. The flowers followed, close to the one-year mark of Sarah’s death. Jaxon checked—it lined up exactly. And now we’re staring down the five-year anniversary.
Makes sense why he’s escalating.
Why he wrote TIME’S UP on the wall.
The anniversary is tomorrow.
