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The car was an old sedan, parked in the alley behind the hospital, covered in dust and bird shit and the kind of neglect that came from being used for things its manufacturer had never intended. The engine turned over twice before it caught, coughing blue smoke into the twilight air.
Dragan gripped the wheel and pulled out of the alley without waiting for Morte to buckle her seatbelt.
The hospital disappeared behind them, swallowed by the gathering dark. Dragan watched it shrink in the rearview mirror—a white block against the orange sky, the windows dark and hollow, the door they'd come through still hanging open. She kept watching until a bend in the road took it away completely out of view. Then she watched the empty stretch of road where it had been.
Her hands were shaking, slick with sweat and blood.
Blood had dried across her skin, tightening as it hardened like a second layer, pulling at the creases of her knuckles and the insides of her wrists. She could feel it in her hair, stiffening the strands and matting them against her scalp. The smell clung to her too—copper, salt, something deeper, something organic that seemed lodged inside her nose to the down of her throat no matter how many times she swallowed and tried to focus on something else.
Morte leaned her head back against the headrest, her black cloak pooling around her like a puddle of shadow. Blood streaked one cheek, a careless splash she hadn't bothered to wipe away.She looked like a painting of something ancient and terrible, maybe medieval, rendered in red and white and the dying light of the sun.
"Put the windows down," she said. "I want to feel the air."
Dragan lowered both front windows without answering.
Wind rushed through the car, cool and sharp. It carried the smell of grass and dust with it, cutting through the stench of blood and decay and diluting it until it was almost bearable.
The road was empty, winding through fields browned from the summer heat. Golden grass stretched to the horizon, interrupted only by the occasional scrub oaks or crooked fence posts. Above them, the sunset had dissolved into layers of orange, purple, and deep red, the last light bleeding behind the distant hills.
Dragan's hands were still shaking.
The steering wheel vibrated under her palms. The car pulled slightly to the left, and she corrected automatically, the motion so ingrained she barely registered it.
She kept seeing Raven's face.
The small red bloom in the center of her forehead. The way her eyes had stayed open, surprised, like she couldn't quite believe what had happened, even while bleeding out, even in death. The way she'd fallen—backward, slow, in such an uncomfortable way that Dragan had winced at that moment. Raven had been dead before she hit the ground.
Dragan had known Raven for years. She had followed her into the Veil, believed in her, devoted herself to her with a fervor that dangerously bordered on worship. She'd let Raven use her, manipulate her, keep her at arm's length while dangling the promise of something more. She had built her entire sense of purpose around a woman who had taken everything she was willing to give.
And now Raven was dead.
Shot in the head by Morte, who had done it because she felt like it. Because it was there. Because the game was over and she wanted to add one more body to the tally.
Dragan’s jaw tightened.
.
Morte walked toward Raven, her boots leaving red footprints on the concrete. She crouched down in front of her, and Raven looked up, her face pale and streaked with dirt and someone else's blood.
"Hey," Morte said, soft, almost gentle. "You did good. You lasted longer than most."
Raven didn't answer. She had watched people die. She had watched Dragan kill. She had watched Morte laugh while she did it.
Morte reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind Raven's ear. "I'm sorry it had to end like this."
Then she shot her.
Morte straightened, the gun hanging loosely from her hand. She looked down at Raven's body for a moment, head tilted.
"Fun," she grinned.
Dragan's hand tightened on her knife. "Why did you do that?"
Morte turned to look at her, the smile still in place. "Because I wanted to. Because she was there. Because it was the end of the game and I felt like it." She shrugged, a lazy roll of her shoulders. "Does there have to be a reason?"
"She was innocent."
"We were all innocent once." Morte walked past her, toward the back door. "Come on. I'm sick of this place."
.
Dragan's jaw clenched so hard her teeth ached.
"You're brooding," Morte said. She said it without opening her eyes, without moving, her voice flat and matter-of-fact.
"I'm not brooding."
Morte opened one eye, a sliver of green in the fading light. "You're thinking about her."
"Of course I'm thinking about her." The words came out harsher than Dragan intended, cold and jagged. "You just shot her in the head."
"I did." Morte's voice remained infuriatingly light, almost playful. "It was fun."
Dragan's grip on the wheel tightened until her knuckles went white. The car swerved slightly as her arms tensed, and she forced herself to relax, to breathe, to focus on the road unwinding in front of her.
"That's all you have to say?”
Morte opened both eyes now, turning her head to look at Dragan.
"What do you want me to say? That I'm sorry? I'm not. That I regret it? I don't. She was there, and I wanted to, and I blew her brains out." She shrugged, a lazy roll of her shoulders. "It’s really not hard to understand. Nothing personal."
"She was innocent." Dragan repeated, voice trembling.
"I thought we talked about this already.” Morte frowned, but continued on. “She was the judge right? She was one of sixteen. Fifteen were already dead. Eighteen are dead in total.” She paused. “She was going to be the sixteenth anyway, eventually. Do you really think it would be a good idea for her to live, escape and shove us to the authorities?"
"You don't know that." Dragan looked away.
"I know people." Morte reached over and rested her hand on Dragan's thigh, her palm warm through the blood-soaked fabric of her pants. "And I knew her.”
Dragan’s shoulders stiffened.
“She was never going to give you what you wanted, Dragan. She was never going to look at you the way you looked at her.”
Dragan’s throat tightened.
“You were useful to her. That’s all.”
Morte's thumb moved absently against the blood-soaked fabric.
“Tools get discarded when they're no longer needed."
Dragan wanted to argue. She wanted to pull the car over and scream at Morte, to tell her she was wrong, that Raven had cared, that all the years of devotion meant something. But the words wouldn't come. They lodged somewhere behind her ribs.
Because Morte wasn’t wrong.
Raven had never looked at her the way she wanted. Never touched her the way she craved. Never given her anything except puzzles and distance and the constant, aching uncertainty of whether she mattered at all. She’d brush her shoulder, offer the smallest gesture of affection, and then retreat behind another wall.
And Dragan had stayed anyway. Had kept coming back, kept hoping, kept pouring herself into a vessel that could never hold her.
"I don't know what to feel," she said, voice cracking on the last word.
For once, Morte didn’t answer immediately. She shifted closer instead, moving her hand from Dragan’s thigh to her shoulder.
"You don't have to feel anything right now," she said, and Dragan audibly swallowed at that. "You can feel it later. Or you can not feel it at all. That's the nice thing about feelings, they're optional if you're good at ignoring them."
"That sounds like something a sociopath would say."
A crooked smile appeared on Morte’s face.
"Probably." She looked through the windshield. "But I'm still here, and she's not, so maybe the sociopath was right all along."
Dragan let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding, still not daring to look at Morte’s face. It came out shaky, uneven, more sob than sigh, and she rubbed her eyes with her palm.
The road stretched ahead of them, empty and endless, the white lines flicking past in a hypnotic rhythm. The car hummed beneath them, the engine a steady drone that filled the silence. The wind whipped through the open windows, cold and clean, gradually stripping the smell of blood from the car in slow increments.
She didn't know how long they drove like that—minutes, maybe an hour. The sky morphed from orange to purple to deep blue, the first stars appearing in the east. The fields gave way to scrubland, then to trees, the road curving through a forest that had gone dark and still. Eventually the road disappeared beneath a canopy of darkness.
Morte reached for the radio.
The dial crackled through static before landing on something like an old, classic blues song, the kind of thing you'd hear in a bar at closing time, like Martin’s, all slide guitar and gravelly vocals. She turned it up, then leaned back, her eyes closing.
"Just listen," she murmured. Dragan kept her eyes on the road. "Feel the wind. You're alive, Dragan. That's more than most of those people can say."
The words sounded almost absurd.
The music filled the car, warm and melancholy, the guitar winding through the melody like a voice. The singer was crooning about heartbreak and highways, about leaving things behind and never looking back. It was the kind of song that was sad without being heavy, that carried its sadness like a familiar weight.
She wanted to tell Morte that being alive didn't feel like a gift right now, that it felt like a punishment, that she could still feel Raven's blood on her skin even though she hadn't been the one to pull the trigger, that she could still hear Raven’s gravelly voice whispering at the back of her ear and her ghostly arms cradling her by the waist. She wanted to say that she was complicit, that she'd stood there and watched, that she'd done nothing to stop it.
But the music was good. And the wind was cool. And Morte's hand was warm on her shoulder, grounding her, reminding her that she was still here, still solid, still capable of feeling something other than the hollow ache in her chest. She glanced sideways.
Morte was humming. It was a soft sound, barely audible over the music and the wind, but Dragan heard it. A low, lazy hum, matching the melody of the song. Morte's head was tilted back, her throat exposed, her eyes closed, her lips curved in a small, contented smile.
She looked peaceful. For the first time since Dragan had known her—through months of manipulation and violence and the slow unraveling of every pretense—she looked genuinely, unguardedly peaceful. Strangely ordinary.
And for some reason, that made something inside Dragan loosen.
She didn't know when she started humming too. Her breath just suddenly catched the melody, as her throat vibrated with the same notes. It was soft at first, hesitant. It felt wrong to make such an ordinary sound after everything that had happened. Wrong to participate in something so harmless while Raven's body was still somewhere behind them.
But Morte didn’t say anything. If only, her smile widened.
She didn't open her eyes, yet her fingers tightened slightly around Dragan’s shoulder.
"See?" She smirked. Dragan glanced at her in the rearview mirror, "Not so hard."
Dragan kept driving. The road curved through the forest, the trees thinning out to reveal a valley spread below them, dotted with the warm lights of farmhouses and small towns. The sky was dark now, the stars coming out in force, a scatter of diamonds across the velvet black.
Raven was still there, in Dragan's memory. Her blood was still on her skin. The gun shot still echoed somewhere beneath her, with that haunting wide-eyed stare of hers and her ghostly skin reaching out to him for help. None of it had disappeared.
But the music was playing. The wind was blowing. Morte's hand was warm on her shoulder, and she was humming along to a song about heartbreak and highways, and for a moment—just a moment—the weight of everything she'd done and everything she'd lost felt possible to carry.
She let herself hum a little louder.
"Aw, you look pretty cute right now."
"Shut up."
"Don’t feel like it."
Dragan couldn’t help but crack a smile.
She reached over and turned up the radio, letting the music fill the car, drowning out the silence. The car disappeared into the night, headlights cutting a path through the dark, carrying two women covered in blood toward a horizon they couldn't yet see. The stars wheeled overhead, indifferent and eternal, and the road stretched on forever.