Not toward anything. Just away. Away from the lights and the voices she could feel gathering behind her even if she couldn't yet hear them. The rain had blurred everything, her vision, her sense of direction, the distance between her and wherever safety might be. She slowed despite herself, her legs giving degrees of failure with every step until she stumbled and went down hard on one knee.
She got up.
She kept going.
"Aine."
His voice came from behind her, carrying through the rain with the ease of someone who had never once needed to raise it to be heard.
"Don't you dare go any further. Come here." A pause, the kind calculated for effect. "I promise I won't hurt you."
She stopped.
Not because she believed him. Because something in her needed to say it to his face.
She turned.
"You are a liar," she said. The rain was coming down hard between them, soaking her through, plastering her hair flat, and she stood in it without flinching. "I don't want to be with you."
Jokull looked at her from across the distance the rain had made between them. Something moved across his face that was not quite the composed authority she was used to seeing there.
"Turn and look at me," he said quietly. "Properly."
She already was.
He took a slow step forward, his voice dropping to something that wanted to be gentle. "You'll grow cold out here. Come to me." Another step. "I'm your Jokull. Remember?" The words came out with an edge of something beneath them that was not quite desperation but was close enough to recognise. "I didn't want things to be like this. I had no choice."
Aine looked at him through the rain.
"Is it really that difficult?" she asked. Her voice was steady despite everything her body was doing. "To let it go? That choice you took upon yourself?"
"I'm not as perfect as you may think." His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing something complicated. "I'm also human, Aine."
She held his gaze for a long moment.
The rain fell between them.
"That," she said quietly, "is exactly why I don't want to be with you."
She let the words stand in the space between them, clean and final.
"You are not what I expected you to be."
"Expectations?" Jokull's voice shifted, the composed authority cracking at the edges just enough to reveal what was underneath. "You mean Ravi is better than me?" He took a step forward, something raw and unfamiliar moving across his face. "Tell me. What does he give you that I can't? Is it love? Attention? Happiness?" His tone rose, the control he had maintained so carefully beginning to fray at its seams. "Just name it."
Aine looked at him steadily through the rain.
"There is one thing you lack," she said.
"What?" The word came out almost quiet. Almost desperate.
"He is genuine. In all his ways." She held his gaze without blinking. "You are not."
Something shifted behind his eyes. Whatever composure remained dissolved into something fiercer and harder to name. He began closing the gap between them, his steps deliberate, his eyes burning with an intensity that had moved well past negotiation.
Aine reflected his movement without thinking, stepping backward, matching him step for step, the rain still falling between them, until her back connected with something solid behind her.
She didn't have time to look at what it was.
The gunshot split the night open.
Then darkness. Complete and absolute.
Everything stopped.
Tesni
The first thing she was aware of was the pain.
Dull and insistent at the base of her skull, the kind that had been there long enough to settle in and make itself comfortable. She pressed her palm against it and sat up slowly, blinking against the blurriness until the world began to resolve itself into shapes she could make sense of.
A car. Moving. The soft blur of streetlights sliding past dark windows.
She straightened and looked up.
Someone's eyes were already watching her in the rearview mirror.
Tesni went very still.
She knew that face. The hallway. She had seen him there and noted him the way she noted things she didn't yet have a name for, instinctively and without knowing why.
"Where am I?" she asked, her voice coming out steadier than she felt.
The eyes in the mirror shifted slightly. "In my car." A pause that carried something that might have been the edge of an apology. "I'm sorry for bringing you out in such a terrible way. I had no other option."
"No other option." Tesni repeated the words back slowly, letting each one land. "You are contemptuous. Who takes someone like that?"
"Relax." His voice was unhurried. Almost amused. "I won't eat you alive."
"Are you joking with me?" She turned immediately to the door handle and pulled. Nothing. She pulled again. "I want to go home."
The brakes came without warning, sudden and sharp, and the car lurched to a stop with an abruptness that threw her forward before she could brace herself.
"Remain calm, baby girl." His eyes found hers in the mirror again, a slow wink accompanying the words. "You might develop a bruise on that body everyone admires so much."
Tesni stared at his reflection.
"Be quiet," she said, her voice dropping to something flat and precise. "You are just a—"
"An odd way to celebrate your birthday, isn't it?"
The words stopped her completely.
She blinked. "My birthday?"
Her eyes dropped to her watch almost involuntarily. The hands sat just minutes from midnight. Just minutes from the turn of the day that would make her eighteen, that she had been quietly counting toward for weeks without making a show of it.
At twelve o'clock Aine would have woken up.
She always did. Without fail, without an alarm, without needing to be reminded. She would appear in the doorway with that quiet, private version of her smile, the one she kept for moments that belonged only to the two of them, and she would say it in that particular way of hers that made it feel like something sacred rather than something routine.
Happy birthday.
The tears arrived before Tesni had given them permission, gathering fast and heavy, pressing against the back of her eyes with a weight she was not prepared for.
"Yes," she said, her voice smaller than she had intended. Smaller than she ever allowed it to be in front of anyone. "I really am without anything now."
She looked down at her hands in her lap.
"I don't have what I used to have anymore. Everything she gave me. Everything I absorbed from just being near her." She swallowed. "It's gone."
The car moved on through the dark and Tesni sat in the quiet of it, her birthday arriving in minutes, and the one person who would have known exactly what to say unreachable somewhere in a night she couldn't see the edges of.