"Riley, look at me! I’m back!"

But she didn’t react. Not even a flicker. I understood within moments — I was back in the same untethered state as before, weightless and invisible, caught in the space between worlds like something the living couldn’t quite reach and the dead hadn’t fully claimed. Had I really died this time? Was this it?

My first thought wasn’t about the children.

It was about Lewis.

Was he alright?

I looked around the room quickly. Aside from Riley and a handful of nurses moving quietly between monitors, Lewis was nowhere. At least I wasn’t anchored to one spot this time — I was free to move, unmoored and restless, and without hesitation I rushed out into the hallway.

The corridor outside was lined with pack enforcers — more of them than I had ever seen stationed in a single place, positioned at every interval with the careful precision of people following very specific orders. He was truly afraid this time. He wouldn’t allow another attack. The woman who had done this had lost every safe house, every resource, every advantage — and a cornered animal always struck back hardest, with nothing left to lose. Lewis had made sure the children were protected. I could see that much. But where was he?

And where was my body?

I moved down the corridor at a run until I spotted a tall, familiar frame ahead — Theo. Lewis had to be close. Then, cutting through the ambient noise like something drawn from another world entirely, a haunting melody drifted from the emergency stairwell. I slowed and looked. Yael sat there like a ghost of his own, drawing slow and mournful notes from an ocarina, head bowed, shoulders carrying the particular weight of someone who had run out of ways to help and had retreated into the only thing he had left. The sorrow in his music reached straight into me, and even my untethered soul ached from it.

Carl... where are you?

I turned into the nearest room. The ICU. Lewis wasn’t here — access was tightly controlled, which made sense. But I saw myself, lying still and small against white sheets, connected to monitors that beeped in soft, measured pulses. The heart rate was weak. But it was there.

I’m alive. The relief of it moved through me strangely. I almost scared myself to death — literally.

I tried to return to my body the way I had managed before, pressing inward, willing myself back with everything I had. Nothing. The gap between the living world and wherever I was remained exactly as wide and impassable as before. I gave up and kept searching. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

I found him on the rooftop.

He was wearing only a thin white shirt against the biting autumn cold, standing completely still with his back to the door, as though he had been standing there long enough to stop noticing the temperature. There were faint bloodstains on the fabric — old or new, I couldn’t tell. The wind pulled at his sleeves with an indifference that made my chest ache. His hair was longer now, unkempt in a way that Lewis never allowed himself to be, whipping across his face without him raising a hand to push it back. Months had passed since I had really looked at him, and it showed in every line of him. He had lost weight — his already lean frame looked hollowed out, as though something had been quietly consuming him from the inside for a very long time, taking a little more each day while he stood watch over everything else.

I walked toward him slowly.

Snowville barely knew warmth — winter swallowed nearly half the year, and even autumn here bit with a cold that went deeper than temperature. He had to be freezing. The sight of him standing there in that thin shirt, utterly still, utterly alone, made something collapse inside me.

"Carl..." I whispered.

He turned his head slightly, the way a person turns when something brushes the very edge of their perception — not quite a sound, not quite a feeling, but something. I went completely still. And then something like hope cracked open in me, fragile and fierce at once.

I ran to him.

"Carl, I’m right here! I’m here!"

His gaze moved through me and came to rest on the empty air just beyond my shoulder. No focus. No recognition. The light I’d felt a moment ago dimmed.

He couldn’t see me.

He let out a short, broken sound — something caught between a laugh and a surrender, the sound of a man who had been through this enough times to recognize the cruelty of his own hope. "Another illusion?"

"No! No, it’s not an illusion — Carl, I’m really here!" I reached out and tried to touch his face, to cup his jaw the way I had a thousand times. I felt nothing. He felt nothing. We stood inches apart, breathing the same cold air beneath the same pale sky, separated by something that no bond and no amount of love could bridge from this side.

That was the cruelest part. I could see every line of exhaustion carved into his face — the deep circles beneath his eyes, the redness in them, the jaw held tight against something he refused to let break him completely. I could see him with perfect clarity. And he could not hear a single word I was saying.

For so long I had believed that fate had singled me out for suffering. That I was the one carrying the heaviest part of all of this. But standing here, watching him, I understood for the first time how wrong I had been. The one truly being tortured was Lewis. How had he survived these months? How many times had something stirred deep in him — that primal, bone-level pull of the bond between us — only for him to reach out and find nothing there? How many times had he thought he heard my voice, turned toward it, and found empty air?

In another life, he had loved me from a distance, quietly, leaving flowers in the dark and carrying grief like a habit he’d grown too used to break. But this life had been different. We had chosen each other with open eyes. We had built something real and deliberate and alive. He wasn’t a bystander this time — he was woven into every part of me, and every second I remained gone was tearing something essential out of him that he couldn’t name or replace.

His pain had always been greater than mine. From the very beginning, I think, without either of us fully knowing it.

Lewis sank slowly to his knees on the cold rooftop, the movement of someone whose legs had simply stopped being able to hold the weight of it. He looked completely and utterly lost in a way I had never seen him look before — not during any of it, not through any of the worst moments we had survived together.

"Elena..." His voice was barely sound. "If you’re really gone... then take me with you."

"Carl." Something broke open in me. "You can’t come with me. We still have our children. They’re here. They need you. They are the only part of me I can leave you — please."

I wrapped my arms around him, knowing with absolute certainty that he couldn’t feel it, and held on anyway with everything I had.

I had told myself once that if death was my fate, at least I could leave behind something of the love we’d made — our children, proof that we had existed together and that it had mattered. I had thought that was enough. That thinking it made me selfless somehow.

Standing here now, I knew better. I wasn’t selfless at all.

I wanted more. I wanted to see them — really see them, not from some cold in-between place like this. I wanted to hold them, choose their names, feed them even once. They hadn’t tasted milk yet. They’d come into the world and their mother was already a ghost drifting through hallways. Would they feel that absence? Carry it somewhere wordless and deep before they even had words?

And Lewis — what would he become without me? He was made to be a father, present and steady and warm, the kind that children ran toward without thinking. We were supposed to be a family. Loud and chaotic and whole and real.

I don’t want to die. The thought hit me like something solid. I wanted to see their first unsteady steps. I wanted to hear them laugh. I wanted to be there the first time they called me Mama.

I pressed close to Lewis and let my voice break, even knowing he couldn’t hear it. "I don’t want to leave, Carl. I don’t want this."

The sky, which had been pale and motionless, darkened without warning. A light rain began to fall — soft and quiet, landing on Lewis’s upturned face, doing gently what I no longer could.

He tilted his head slowly toward the sky, his voice dropping to almost nothing.

"Elena... are you here?"