THE UNMADE!
```THE UNMADE. !```
`PROLOGUE`
“AAAHHH!”
Noel Rowan’s scream tore through the house, a jagged, broken sound that didn’t belong to a child. Pain exploded through his chest. He gasped, clawing at the blood that soaked his shirt, his lungs on fire.
His mother shoved him backward—hard. “Go! Get—get down!” Her voice was ragged, terrified, but steady enough to push him to the ground. The world spun as he fell, and the smell hit him first: copper, iron, death.
He saw them.
Daniel Rowan slumped against the staircase, face a mask of blood, eyes wide and frozen. A dozen dark, unrelenting shapes loomed over him. And then… Milo. His little brother. Still, silent, broken. His bones… snapped like dry twigs under some cruel hand.
Noel’s stomach lurched, bile rising. He crawled, useless, toward them, and every shot that ripped through their bodies echoed in his head, the sickening crack of shattered bones, the wet, echoing thud as they hit the floor.
“Fucking… move!” someone spat, cold, merciless. But Noel couldn’t move. He could only watch. Could only feel every pulse of horror as Claire’s scream broke like glass in the air, then cut off too quickly, gone, swallowed by the room.
“No… No, no, no!” Noel clawed at the floor, at the wall, at air. His own body was screaming now, blood pouring down, chest heaving. Pain had no edges. Pain had no mercy.
The shooters didn’t stop. One by one, bone by bone, flesh and life… they dismantled everything he loved. The smell of gunpowder, the smell of fear, the smell of blood and ruined innocence, all mixed in the air, thick, choking, inescapable.
He pressed his hands to his wound, tasting iron, tasting grief, tasting rage that had nowhere to go. His mother’s face flashed before his eyes—her eyes wide, her lips trembling as she pushed him aside, sacrificing herself for him. His father… Milo… all gone. Every breath now heavy with emptiness.
The room fell silent, finally. The killers left, shadows slipping into the night. But Noel’s scream stayed. It rattled the walls, echoed through his chest, bounced off the ceiling, and burned into the marrow of his bones.
He was alive. Somehow. Broken. Shattered.
Unmade.