Chapter 37: Chapter 37

I hear him cry out in frustration as he’s pulled back by a half dozen regulators, hands closing around his throat and mouth and nose. He bites at fingers and arms, anything in his way, anything keeping him from me, but there are too many of them, too much strength, and he stumbles away from the door.

I see his silhouette framed in the splintered crack where the door and its jamb no longer meet; his arms pinwheel uselessly at his sides as he tries to shake free from the men holding him down and can’t. He growls my name, and all the hate and pain that he’s ever thrown at me, all the evil that’s in him, it’s all set free in that one word, that voice. It peals through me like a knell, ringing out death—mydeath.