Chapter 169

Harper’s POV

Everything inside me is frozen. My feet won’t move, my breath won’t come, and my mind keeps looping the same shattered second, Mark reaching for me, Theo’s body colliding with his, the sickening sound of the blade piercing flesh, and then... all that blood. So much blood.

Theo stands over Mark now, the knife slipping from his fingers, his chest heaving with the kind of exhaustion that goes beyond the body. It’s in his bones. In his eyes. In the way he sways as he turns to look at me.

“Sorry,” he whispers, so soft I almost don’t hear it.

My lips part, but no sound comes out. I still can’t move.

He blinks, slow and dazed, and I see it then, the tear that slips silently from the corner of his eye, trailing down through blood and sweat and something so much deeper. He takes