The world didn’t end with a whimper. It ended with a roar of light and noise that erased everything I knew to be true.
“Elias, no!”
The scream tore from my throat, raw and bloody, but it was a whisper against the cacophony of the breach. The sawmill, which had been a cathedral of silence moments ago, was now a war zone.
Tactical lights cut through the gloom like lasers, blindingly white, dissecting the shadows where we had just made our fragile peace. The sound of heavy boots on metal grating thundered from every direction—from the catwalks above, from the loading bay doors below.
“Drop the weapon! Drop it now!”
The voice wasn’t human. It was amplified, mechanical, booming from a megaphone that shook the rust off the beams.
Elias stood at the edge of the sorting platform, his back to the gaping maw of the intake pit—a three-story drop into the teeth of the decommissioned chipper. He looked small suddenly. The monster who had terrified Oakhaven, the giant who had crushed a door frame with his bare hands, was shrinking under the glare of the state police.
He held the snub-nosed revolver I had dropped. His hand was shaking.
He didn’t look at the SWAT team swarming the floor. He looked at me.
His eyes, those polished river stones that had watched me from the dark for twenty years, were wide with a heartbreak so profound it sucked the air out of my lungs.
Betrayal.
He thought I had signaled them. He thought the hug, the moment of connection, the breaking of the script—it was all a trap. He thought I was the Judas.
“I didn’t!” I screamed, lunging toward him. “Elias, look at me! I didn’t call them!”
I made it two steps before a wall of Kevlar slammed into me.
“Secure the hostage! Get her back!”
Arms wrapped around my waist, hauling me backward. I kicked and clawed, my boots skidding on the slick iron floor. I smelled gun oil and sweat.
“Let me go!” I shrieked. “Don’t shoot him! He doesn’t understand!”
“Elara, stop!” It was Julian’s voice, close to my ear, desperate and terrified. He wasn’t wearing tactical gear; he was in his shirtsleeves, his badge hanging loose from his belt. He was the one holding me, using his body to shield me from the line of fire.
“Tell them to stop!” I begged, twisting in his grip to face him. “Julian, tell them he’s sick! Tell them he’s a child!”
“He has a gun, Elara!” Julian shouted, his eyes fixed on his brother. “Elias! Put it down! It’s me! It’s Julian!”
Elias’s gaze snapped to Julian. The recognition didn’t bring relief; it brought rage. A snarl twisted his scarred face, revealing the animal I had tried to tame.
“Bad Prince,” Elias growled. The words were low, but in the sudden, breath-held silence of the standoff, they carried like a curse.
He raised the gun.
He didn’t aim it at me. He didn’t aim it at himself.
He aimed it at the line of black-clad officers advancing with ballistic shields.
“Elias, don’t!” I screamed, my voice breaking into a sob.
He wasn’t trying to kill them. I saw it in his stance, loose and reckless. He was trying to die. He was provoking the Dragon to breathe fire.
“Drop the weapon! Final warning!”
Elias smiled. It was the same jagged, broken smile he had given me through the vent when he offered me a Snickers bar. A smile that said, I’ll watch the door.
“The game is over,” he whispered.
He squeezed the trigger.
Crack.
The shot went wide, pinging harmlessly off a steel support beam sparks showering down like fireworks.
But the response was absolute.
The air disintegrated.
POP-POP-POP-POP.
The sound was flat, ugly, and terrifyingly loud. Muzzle flashes bloomed in the dark like camera strobes capturing a tragedy.
I stopped fighting. I stopped breathing. Time didn’t just slow down; it shattered.
I saw the bullets hit him.
Puffs of dust exploded from his filthy coat. His body jerked, a marionette whose strings were being cut one by one.
One hit his shoulder, spinning him around.
One hit his chest, driving the air from him in a visible cloud of vapor.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t look in pain. He looked surprised.
The momentum of the impacts drove him backward. His heels caught the edge of the rusted railing—the railing that was already loose, already corroding.
It gave way with a screech of tearing metal.
Elias tipped back.
For a second, he seemed to hang in the air, suspended in the void above the pit. His arms flailed, the gun flying from his hand and clattering onto the grating.
His eyes found mine one last time.
The anger was gone. The confusion was gone. There was only the boy. The boy who had lived in a shed. The boy who had lived in a wall. The boy who had loved me until it rotted his mind.
Princess.
I saw his lips form the word.
And then he fell.
He dropped into the darkness of the intake pit. There was no sound of him hitting the bottom. Just the swallow of the shadows.
“NO!”
The scream that ripped out of me felt like it took a piece of my soul with it.
I threw myself forward, breaking Julian’s grip with a strength I didn’t know I possessed. I scrambled across the metal floor, my knees slamming into the grating, ignoring the shouts of the officers, ignoring the guns still trained on the empty space.
I reached the edge. The broken railing hung over the abyss, swinging creakily.
I looked down.
Darkness.
The pit was deep, a black throat that went down into the bowels of the earth where the old machinery rusted in the damp.
“Elias!” I shrieked, my voice echoing off the concrete walls.
Silence.
“Flashlights!” Julian roared behind me. “Get lights in the hole! Now!”
Beams of tactical light crisscrossed the void, cutting through the dust motes agitated by the violence. They swept over the rusted gears, the conveyor belts frozen in time, the stagnant water pooled at the bottom.
And there, twenty feet down, sprawled across the teeth of the main chipper gear.
He looked like a pile of discarded rags. One leg was twisted at an impossible angle. His coat was soaking up the dark liquid spreading beneath him.
He wasn’t moving.
I stared at him, waiting. Waiting for him to stand up. Waiting for him to scratch on the wall. Waiting for the monster to be invincible.
But monsters are just flesh. And flesh breaks.
“He’s gone,” I whispered.
A hand grabbed the back of my coat. Not Julian this time. A SWAT officer, faceless behind a visor.
“Ma’am, step back. We need to clear the area.”
“Don’t touch me,” I said, but the words had no heat. I felt cold. Colder than I had ever felt in the root cellar. Colder than the coal bin.
Julian was there suddenly, pushing the officer away. He knelt beside me, his hand gripping my shoulder hard enough to bruise. He looked down into the pit.
I watched his face. I watched the realization hit him. I watched the brother die inside him, replaced by the cop, and then shattered back into the brother.
He let out a sound—a choked, strangled gasp that sounded like a drowning man surfacing.
“Elias,” he whispered.
He looked at me. His eyes were wet, red-rimmed, and filled with a horror that mirrored my own.
“He didn’t shoot,” Julian said, his voice shaking. “He aimed high. I saw it. He aimed at the ceiling.”
“I know,” I said. The tears finally came, hot and fast, blurring the sight of the broken body below. “He wasn’t trying to kill them, Julian. He was trying to save me.”
“Save you from what?”
“From him,” I said. “He knew. At the end… I think he knew he was the monster.”
The police were swarming now. Ropes were being deployed. Medics were shouting questions that had no answers.
Is the scene secure? Is the subject neutralized?
Neutralized.
They talked about him like he was a chemical spill. Like he was a threat to be contained.
They didn’t know. They didn’t know about the Snickers bars. They didn’t know about the shoes under the porch. They didn’t know that the man lying broken in the dark was the only person who had ever truly seen me.
I leaned over the edge, staring at his stillness.
“Goodnight, Sandman,” I whispered, the childhood ritual tasting like ash in my mouth.
There was no scratch in response. No voice from the vent.
Just the dripping of rain through the shattered roof, washing the blood into the earth.
Julian pulled me back from the edge. He wrapped his arms around me, burying his face in my neck. He was shaking. We were both shaking.
“It’s over,” he said. “Elara, it’s over.”
I looked at the empty space where the railing used to be.
“No,” I said, my voice hollow. “It’s not over. He’s just hiding again.”
But I knew it was a lie.
The fall had broken him. The fall had finished what the river started twenty years ago.
Elias Thorne was finally dead.
And I was the one left standing in the wreckage of his love.