[BL] Bound to My Enemy: The Billionaire Who Took My Girl Chapter 324: Faded

CASSIAN

The tears were pouring down my nose, dripping onto his pale cheeks. "I have the money, Julian. I have the keys to the building in the safe. We were almost out of the city. We were so close to the edge of it. Julian, please. I’m so sorry. I should have been there when they kicked the door in. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry."

Julian’s face was perfectly still against mine. The small green jade pendant he always wore hung loose against his collarbone, covered in the sa dark red that was now on my hands, my clothes, and my face. I didn’t notice it. I didn’t care about the ss.

I began to rub his fingers between my palms, frantically chafing his skin back and forth to bring the warmth back into them. It was the completely irrational, frantic act of a man whose mind has completely fractured, a man whose brain refuses to accept what his hands have known for five minutes.

I stayed there on my knees for a very long ti. I sat in the middle of the red puddle, surrounded by the silence of the dead n and the high, white glare of the lamps, and nothing else in the world mattered anymore. Not the family, not the city, not myself. Nothing.

The first sound that ca from the outside world was a siren. It was a distant, high-pitched wail, drifting in from the highway over the salt marshes, but it sounded thin, as if it were happening on the other side of a thick pane of glass. I barely heard it.

But then, another sound started up.

It wasn’t coming from the yard outside the warehouse. It was coming from sowhere underneath the concrete floor, or sowhere high above the rafters, a frantic, tallic noise of clicking buttons and rushing footsteps that didn’t belong in this empty building.

There were voices overlapping each other, loud and professional, but they had the wrong acoustics for this city. They sounded hollow, trapped inside a tiny box.

"We’re losing him!" a voice shouted. It was a man’s voice, but it wasn’t Emilio or Don Aldo. "Get the line back in! His blood pressure is dropping too fast!"

I stayed on my knees, my hands still wrapped around Julian’s cold fingers, and looked up at the ceiling.

The corrugated steel was beginning to flicker, the white light of the construction lamps stuttering like a film strip coming off its reel.

Another voice cut through the noise. This one was closer, right next to my ear, carrying a deep, terrifying desperation that had no na in this version of my life.

It was a familiar voice, a sound I knew the way a man knows the shape of his own hands, but I couldn’t place it among the warehouses or the docks.

"Co on," the voice sobbed, right against my cheek. "Please, Cassian. Co on. Don’t do this."

The room gave a violent shudder. The edges of the concrete walls were dissolving into gray mist, and for a split second, the dark red blood on the floorboards turned a strange, clear fluid color before snapping back to red.

The walls around were wrong; they were too clean, too white.

Julian was still in my arms, his head heavy against my shoulder, but then... he wasn’t. He didn’t disappear, but he beca less solid, like an old photograph dropped into a bucket of water, the image was still there, but the ink was starting to run and move at the edges.

"Cassian!" the voice scread again. It sounded like soone who had been calling my na for hours, soone who was running out of breath and strength but refused to stop shouting into the dark.

I knew that voice. I knew it from a place far away from the Vincenti family or the coast road. I knew it the way you rember a song you heard before you were old enough to understand the words.

"Julian?" I called out into the flickering room, but the na didn’t bring him back. The figure in my arms was turning to smoke.

"I’m here," the voice from the other side answered, breaking through the white glare. "I’m right here with you. Please wake up, Cassian. Please."

The sirens were getting louder now, but they were ringing in two different places at the exact sa ti. The police cars were pulling into the gravel lot outside the industrial building, and at the sa mont, a high, chanical screaming was going off in a room I couldn’t see yet.

The warehouse doors were kicked open with a massive crash. n with long rifles and black helts poured through the gap, their boots loud against the gravel, their shouts layering over those other, urgent dical voices until the air was nothing but noise.

"Drop the weapon! Stay on the ground!"

I didn’t move from the floor. I didn’t look at the red laser dots dancing across my chest, and I didn’t register the guns as a threat worth responding to. They could pull the triggers if they wanted; it didn’t change the fact that my hands were empty.

A pair of heavy hands grabbed by the shoulders from behind, yanked backward, and dragged away from the center of the floor.

My fingers stayed closed, stiff and hooked, still trying to hold onto the shape of Julian’s hand even after they had pulled my body a yard away from him.

The dream was being ripped away from , or I was being ripped away from the dream, and I couldn’t tell which side was the real one anymore.

Then ca a different pair of hands... cold, rubbery gloves pressing against my neck, a bright, sterile light burning straight through my eyelids, and the sharp, chemical sll of bleach and plastic that had absolutely no place in that old industrial lot.

"He’s coming back!" a voice yelled directly above my head. "The heart rate is stabilizing! Mr. Wolfe, can you hear ? Look at the light!"

And underneath all the clatter of the tal poles and the screaming monitors, there was that one single voice again.

It wasn’t official, it wasn’t dical, it was just... there, the sa way it had been every single day while I was asleep.

"I’m here," Noah whispered, his hand finding mine in the white glare. "I’m still here, Cassian."

I was in the blood on the tile, and I was in the white room with the plastic tubing, both things happening at the exact sa ti until the border between them completely vanished.

Julian’s face was the very last thing to go... his one open eye finding mine across the distance one final ti before the entire universe went stark white.

What the police found when they broke through the tal doors of the lot wasn’t what they had expected to see after a report of shots fired in the marshes.

They had expected to find a typical gangland cleanup, a couple of runners loading crates into the back of a van.

Instead, they found a slaughterhouse.

And right in the middle of the dead n, sitting in a massive pool of red that wasn’t his own, was a single man on his knees.

He was holding the hand of a boy who was far past hearing anything he had to say, his fingers locked so tightly around the cold wrist that they had to wrench them apart by force.

I didn’t resist them when they pulled up. I didn’t say a word, I didn’t look at the badges, and I wasn’t present in any way that made sense to the officers who were shouting at .

My eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead at the blank wall, but I wasn’t seeing the corrugated iron anymore.

The officers were yelling commands, their voices high and nervous because of the bodies on the concrete, but the words didn’t translate to anything in my head. They were just empty noise.

An officer stepped into my space, grabbed my arms, and pulled them behind my back. My fingers stayed curled into that hollow, empty fist... the exact shape of holding sothing that wasn’t there anymore.

They stood up on my feet, and my legs moved chanically, walking across the floor because soone was pushing my shoulder blades.

The rest of was entirely sowhere else. I was still sitting on the bench by the coast road; I was still inside the flat with the keys in my pocket; I was still standing on that gravel roof at twenty-three years old, watching Julian blow out the candles on a birthday cake he had pretended was his own idea just to see smile.

The cold tal of the handcuffs clicked around my wrists. I didn’t help them, and I didn’t fight the tal; I was just a physical shell being steered through the room by n who were terrified of what I had done, n who didn’t understand that they didn’t need to be afraid of anymore. Not tonight. Not ever again.

One of the younger officers looked at my face as we reached the exit, and he looked away imdiately, unable to keep his eyes on my skin.

It wasn’t because my face was frightening or because I looked dangerous; it was because there was nothing left behind my eyes at all. It was just the face of a man who had been completely and quietly destroyed from the inside out.

The last thing I saw before they shoved my head down into the back seat of the transport car was Julian lying on the white tile. He was exactly where I had left him, completely still, the little green jade pendant catching the last of the construction light.

I closed my eyes. The heavy tal door slamd shut, cutting off the view, and the sirens outside started up their long, miserable wail as the car began to move.

The dream stopped there. Or it didn’t stop, but the dark took it back.

And sowhere above the dirt, miles away from the marshes, the machines kept clicking, the bright lights kept burning, and the sll of the bleach waited for to open my eyes.