CHAPTER 430: ABYSS

ARIA

The news anchor’s voice was a dull, buzzing insect. The words were separate from their meaning, floating in the sterile air of the hospital room.

"Sarah Brown’s dark past revealed... admission to mental institution at age eight... suspected involvement in murder of Cain Matthews..."

My stomach didn’t just drop. It plummeted, leaving a void where my organs should have been.

This was not happening. This was a play on a screen, a story about a stranger. I was a spectator, floating somewhere near the ceiling, watching a girl who looked like me sit on a stiff hospital bed.

But it was real.

The memory of Sarah’s voice, flat and empty, was a shard of ice in my gut. "Maybe he secretly wanted it."

A hot, sharp self-loathing pierced the numbness. How could I have been so stupid, so fucking blind? What kind of fool builds her entire world on a foundation of lies and calls it friendship? Why couldn’t I tell that something was off?

My chest caved in with the force of it, a physical collapsing under the weight of a truth that kept coming, a relentless tide smashing against the shore of who I thought I was.

What was Sarah? Were any of our memories real?Every shared secret, every fit of laughter, every time I had cried in her arms... were they all just lines in a script she had written? Had I been a puppet, and she the only one who could see the strings?

I felt my mind beginning to fracture. The edges of my vision softened, threatening to pull me back into the abyss I had barely escaped.

I had hoped. With a desperate, childish fervor, I had prayed that it was all a terrible mistake. That Kael was confused, that Ash was paranoid, that there was some logical, sane reason for the impossible.

I had wanted my best friend back.

But the evidence was a mountain. And her face, in that café, when the mask had finally slipped... that was the most damning proof of all.

I should have felt vindicated. Relieved. The truth was free.

Instead, a cold, black dread wrapped around my throat and began to squeeze.

A loud pop cracked outside the window.

Fireworks.

The sound jerked me back into my body, into this room, into the sharp smell of antiseptic. I was in the hospital. Ewan Roman was down the hall, suspended between life and death. Kael, dealing with that fresh hell, had insisted I come here with Ash after the confrontation.

For tests.

Now I sat alone on the edge of a cold, paper-covered bed, the ghost of a needle’s pinch in my arm.

Waiting.

Ash was outside, her low murmur a counterpoint to the doctor’s clinical tone.

Another firework. A starburst of green and gold against the deep night.

It was New Year’s Eve.

The whole city was gathering to cheer, to kiss, to hope. To believe in a clean slate.

The thought was a physical nausea.

This year had been a car crash in slow motion. I had lost my mother. Then my father. I had nearly died. I had fallen in love so deeply it felt like discovering a new organ, only to have it ripped out. I had learned that the person I trusted most was a stranger, a monster wearing a familiar face.

The pressure behind my eyes built, a hot, stinging ache. I was so tired of tears. I had trained myself for years not to cry, because once I started, it felt like I would never stop. It felt like the sadness was a vast, underground ocean, and my tears were just a warning that the ground was about to give way.

But the dam broke again anyways.

A single, hot tear escaped, tracing a path to my chin. Then another. And then they were not falling, they were pouring. A silent, relentless river of utter defeat.

I couldn’t pretend I was okay. I wasn’t.

Everything was broken. My heart was a shattered vessel. My body ached with a deep, living exhaustion. My mind was a cracked mirror, reflecting a thousand fractured versions of a reality I could no longer trust.

I wanted it to stop. Just for one second. One moment of pure, silent nothingness. No pain. No memory. No self.

A dark, quiet part of me whispered that it would be easier to just... die. To not have to breathe through this. To not have to be this fragile, broken thing that kept getting up, only to be shattered again.

I didn’t know how to stop being.

So I was trapped. Condemned to endure. To keep forcing air in and out of lungs that burned, to keep a heart beating that felt like it was pumping shattered glass.

The pressure in my chest intensified, sharp and vicious, a hand closing around my heart and squeezing. I needed to move. To run.

I pushed myself off the bed.

My legs dissolved. They were water, they were air.

I collapsed. My knees hit the cold tile with a sickening jolt that shot up my spine.

And then I couldn’t breathe.

My lungs were sealed. I gasped, a ragged, useless sound, but no air came. My throat was sealed shut.

Panic, pure and animal, seized me.

The tears were a flood now, blinding me, soaking the collar of my T-shirt. I clawed at my own chest, my fingers scrambling for purchase against the unbearable tightness.

Breathe. Just breathe.

My body revolted. Violent, wrenching sobs tore from me, ugly and raw. My shoulders shook uncontrollably. I folded in on myself, my forehead pressing into the unforgiving coolness of the floor, my arms wrapping around my head as if I could physically hold my skull together.

It was too much. The weight of every loss, every betrayal, every lie was a mountain on my back, and I was crumbling beneath it.

I couldn’t carry it. I didn’t have the strength anymore. I wanted to lay down and let the earth swallow me whole.

The door opened.