Chapter Thirty-Two: Embers and Echoes
The world came back in pieces.
First, a sterile, antiseptic smell that coated the inside of my nose and throat. Then, a low, steady beeping—a mechanical heartbeat that wasn't my own. A dull, throbbing ache anchored deep in my right shoulder, wrapped in layers of numbness.
My eyelids were crusted, heavy as stone slabs. I forced them open. The light was dim, but it still stung. Blurred shapes resolved into the bland, beige ceiling of a hospital room.
A figure shifted in the chair beside my bed. Damien. His face was gaunt, etched with a week's worth of exhaustion and a grief so profound it had hollowed out his cheeks. He was leaning forward, his head in his hands.
My throat was a desert. I tried to speak, but only a dry, cracked sound emerged. The names were a reflex, etched into my soul by fire and fear.
"L…Lucia… A…Adrian…"
Damien's head snapped up. His bloodshot eyes widened, disbelief warring with a surge of desperate hope. "Arisha?" He was at my bedside in an instant, his hand hovering, as if afraid to touch me. "You're awake. Oh, thank God."
I blinked slowly, twice, trying to make sense of his presence, of the tubes in my arm, of the vast, aching emptiness where my memories should be. The last thing I remembered… an alley. A crack of sound. Fire in my back. Lucia's screams.
"Where…" I croaked, the word scraping. "Where am I? What happened?"
Damien's face contorted. He poured a cup of water from a pitcher, holding the straw to my lips with a trembling hand. The cool liquid was a miracle. "You're in St. Vincent's. Private wing. You've been… you were shot, Arisha. In the alley. You lost a lot of blood. There was trauma, surgery… you've been under for a week."
A week. The words meant nothing. Time had dissolved in that alley. But the urgency, the terror, came rushing back, sharper than the pain in my shoulder. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand, my grip weak but frantic.
"Adrian," I gasped. "My husband… where is he? And Lucia! Who took her? Did they find her?"
The change in Damien's face was catastrophic. All the color, what little was left, drained away. The hope in his eyes snuffed out, replaced by a bottomless, frozen horror. He looked like a man who had been holding up the sky with his bare hands, and his strength had finally failed.
The door to the room flew open. My mother stood there, a paper cup of coffee crushed in her hand, her face a map of sleepless nights and wept-out tears. When she saw my open eyes, a sob broke from her. She rushed to the other side of the bed, her hands fluttering, desperate to touch me but scared of my wires and bandages. Finally, she grasped my left hand, holding it in both of hers, weeping.
"My baby. My brave, foolish girl. You came back to me."
"Mama," I whispered, my eyes darting between her devastated face and Damien's shattered one. The dread was a cold serpent coiling in my gut. "Where is Adrian? Why isn't he here? And Lucia… Damien, tell me they found Lucia!"
My mother's weeping intensified. She pressed my hand to her wet cheek. Damien lowered his head, his shoulders slumping as if under an unimaginable weight.
"Arisha…" Damien's voice was a ghost of itself. "The mansion… the night you were shot… there was a fire."
A fire. The word was a key, turning in a lock deep in my stunned mind. Not the wrong fire in my back. A different one.
"The Madden estate," Damien continued, forcing the words out like shards of glass. "It was targeted. It burned. Completely."
He paused, the silence in the room swelling, punctuated only by my mother's muffled cries and the relentless, cheerful beep of the heart monitor.
"They… they were inside, Arisha. William. Maria." He took a shuddering breath, the worst still to come. His eyes, filled with an ocean of pity and shared agony, met mine. "Adrian."
The word landed. Not as a sound, but as an impact. It didn't compute. It was a foreign language, a nonsense syllable. Adrian. Inside. Burned.
"No," I breathed. The single syllable was a denial of the universe itself.
"The police… the fire department… they recovered remains. They've been… identified." Damien's voice broke. "I'm so sorry. They're all gone."
Gone.
All gone.
William's flinty wisdom, Maria's gentle grace, Adrian's… Adrian's everything. His smile, his temper, his hands, his voice, the future he whispered in the dark—reduced to remains. Identified.
The world didn't go black. It went white. A silent, screaming white noise that erased everything. The pain in my shoulder vanished. The beeping of the monitor faded. I was floating in a void where the only real thing was the word, echoing in the emptiness.
Gone.
"And Lucia?" The question came from somewhere far away, from the shell of the girl who used to be Arisha.
Damien shook his head, a slow, hopeless movement. "The kidnappers… the van. It vanished. No ransom demand. No contact. The investigation is… it's a maze. With the family gone, the resources, the political will… it's gone cold. We have nothing."
So. That was the sum total.
Adrian, my heart, was ash.
Lucia, my spirited sister, was a ghost.
His parents, my unexpected family, were shadows.
And I was alive. Propped up in a sterile bed, with a hole in my shoulder and a cavern where my soul used to be. The wrong fire had only wounded me. The right fire had taken everything else.
A sound began then, low in my chest. It wasn't a sob. It wasn't a scream. It was the raw, barren sound of a landscape after a wildfire. A hollow, endless exhale with no hope of an inhale.
My mother clutched my hand, weeping. Damien stared at the floor, defeated.
I closed my eyes, not to sleep, but to retreat into the white noise. The beeping monitor tracked the beating of a heart that no longer had a reason to beat. I had woken up.
But the girl who loved Adrian Madden, the wife who had a home and a family and a future… she had died in that alley, a week ago. All that was left in this bed was an echo, and a name that was now just a memory, and ash.