CHAPTER 418: DRIVE BACK

ARIA

The dread was not just a feeling; it was a third passenger in the car, a viscous, living entity that filled the space between Ash and me, making the air thick and difficult to breathe. It coiled in my stomach, a nest of cold snakes that tightened with every mile marker we passed, a relentless countdown to a moment I both craved and feared.

The memory of Ash’s phone call was a fresh brand on my soul. The way her sharp, confident face had gone slack, all the color draining away as if someone had pulled a plug. Her voice, usually a weapon, had dropped to a horrified whisper.

"It’s Ewan Roman. He’s in the hospital. They’re saying it doesn’t look good." And my mind,my hopelessly singular mind, did not conjure images of a powerful dynasty crumbling or corporate empires shifting. It painted one picture, over and over: Kael. Kael standing alone in some sterile, overlit hallway, his broad shoulders finally bowing under a weight I had willingly helped place there. He would be turning to stone from the inside out. And he would be doing it completely alone.

My body had moved before the thought was fully formed, operating on a primal frequency of pure, undiluted need. My small, sad bag. The pathetic wad of cash I’d scraped together. A single clean shirt. The motions were robotic, my mind a screaming, desperate chorus of him, him, him, I have to get to him.

Ash’s hand on my arm was the only tether to reality. "I brought a car. We’ll drive back together." And now,the road stretched ahead, an endless gray river leading to a cliff edge. The nausea was a constant, rolling tide inside me, a physical manifestation of the sickness festering in my soul. This wasn’t morning sickness. This was grief-sickness. Guilt-sickness. A poison I had swallowed the moment I walked away from him.

After two hours, Ash pulled into a gas station that stood alone in a vast expanse of flat fields. "We need fuel," she said, her voice tight. "And you need to eat something. You’re shaking."

I nodded, though the idea of food was a cruel joke. My body was a hollowed-out shell, trembling from a combination of exhaustion and a terror so profound I could taste it, metallic and sharp, on my tongue.

While Ash argued with someone on the phone about hospital security and access, her voice a sharp, angry blade cutting through the rural quiet, I drifted into the convenience store like a ghost.

The fluorescent lights hummed a dismal tune, bleaching all the color from the world. My hands moved on their own, placing chips, crackers, a bottle of water into a small plastic basket. Nourishment for a ghost who either ate too much or sometimes forgot how to eat.

Then I turned the corner into the family planning aisle.

And the world shrunk to the space between me and that shelf.

The pregnancy tests sat in their neat, colorful boxes, a row of silent judges. A question I had been too much of a coward to answer. My hand lifted of its own volition, my fingers hovering just above the cardboard, drawn by a terrible, devastating magnetism.

To know would be to make it real. And nothing in my shattered life could be real, could have any meaning or weight, until I saw his face again. Until I knew he was okay.

No. I snatched my hand back as if burned,my heart hammering against my ribs. I stumbled away, my breath catching, and found myself in another aisle.

And there it was. Strawberry milk. The cheap, sugary kind from our university days, from late-night study sessions and shared secrets on her dorm room floor. A relic from a life before the world had cracked open and shown me the abyss beneath.

I grabbed it, a pathetic, desperate attempt to summon the ghost of that simpler, happier girl, to remember a time when Sarah was just my best friend and not the architect of my ruin.

Back in the car, the sweet, cloying smell of the milk hit me. I drank it greedily, a desperate communion with a past that was now a lie. I chugged it, the too-sweet liquid a mockery of comfort.

And my body, my traitorous body, revolted against the memory.

It was a violent, wrenching convulsion. I barely got the car door open before I was on my hands and knees, heaving the pink, sugary bile onto the oil-stained pavement. My body spasmed, trying to expel the innocence, the trust, the entire beautiful, poisoned history of our friendship.

"Aria!" Ash was there in an instant, her hand a firm, warm pressure on my back. "Jesus Christ, are you okay?"

I couldn’t answer. I could only kneel there, empty and shuddering, strings of saliva and pink milk dripping from my lips. When it finally stopped, I slumped against the cold metal of the car door, gasping, utterly spent.

"That’s it! This is the second time today." she said, her voice firm but layered with a fear I rarely heard from her. "We’re finding a hospital. Or a motel. You need to rest. You look like death."

"No." The word was a raw scrape from my tortured throat. I looked at her, my vision swimming with unshed tears and exhaustion. "Please. Just drive. I can’t... I can’t wait. I can’t let him be alone."

She listened... Barely.

The road became a purgatory, a monotonous hellscape of fading fields and sleeping towns. Ash filled the heavy silence with logistics, her words painting a picture of my own isolation. "There’s no direct train from where we were. The railway system doesn’t extend that far out. The nearest airport is three hours in the wrong direction. Driving is our only option."

I knew that... It’s why I chose to come here.

"How long?" I asked, my voice small and broken.

"Six, maybe seven hours total. Depends on traffic when we hit the city limits." Six or seven hours.An eternity in which his world could end without me.

"What about Kael’s father?" I asked, the question a whisper.

"It seems he’s in surgery," she said, her eyes glued to the road, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. "Last I heard, Kael was already at the hospital. He’s been there a while now."

The guilt was a physical weight then, a leaden cloak that settled over my shoulders, pressing down on my lungs until each breath was a ragged, painful victory. He was there.

Living a nightmare. And I had chosen to be absent. I had added my abandonment to the mountain of pain he was forced to carry.

With nothing else to do, my mind, my treacherous mind, began to tear itself apart.

It replayed the file Ash had shown me. Not just the words, but the pictures. Cain’s body, not just dead, but systematically, horrifically unmade. A message of pure hatred written in viscera and severed limbs.

It replayed Eric’s recorded confession, his voice broken and ashamed, describing Sarah’s cold seduction, her calculated manipulation, the way she’d blackmailed him into betraying me.

Then it kept going, a horrifying montage. Ryan. Damon. Kyle. A graveyard of my relationships, and standing at the head of each fresh grave, holding a shovel and wearing a smile of compassionate concern, was Sarah. My Sarah. Smiling. Offering me a tissue. Telling me I deserved better.

The truth did not dawn. It detonated.

It wasn’t that she was my constant. She was my curator. She was the one who had carefully built the walls of my life, who had hand-selected every failure, who had gently guided me toward the wrong men and then held me, weeping, when they inevitably broke my heart.

All so I would never look anywhere else. All so I would always, always come home to her. She had been the sun in my sky, and I hadn’t realized she was also the poison in my water.

A cold so profound it felt like burning spread through my veins. My breath hitched, coming in short, useless gasps. The face of my best friend, the sister of my soul, the person I had loved most in this world, superimposed over the image of a monster, a predator who had been feeding on my life for years.

"Aria?" Ash’s voice was sharp with a worry that bordered on panic. "You’re white as a sheet. You’re scaring me."

I realized my hands were clenched on the door handle, my knuckles stretched so tight the skin was translucent. A fine, violent tremor was wracking my entire body.

"Don’t slow down," I whispered, the words a desperate, broken plea. "I can’t let him be alone. I can’t."

The city skyline finally emerged through the haze, a jagged crown of thorns against a dark sky. Ash drove with a furious, determined purpose, weaving through traffic with a recklessness that would have terrified me under any other circumstance.

She pulled up sharply to the hospital’s main entrance, a fortress of glass and steel where lives were saved and lost.

"Third floor," she said, her voice quick and urgent. "Private wing. Niko should be there. He’ll show you where Kael is."

I nodded, my movements stiff, and pushed the car door open. My legs felt like water.

"Aria," Ash called after me.

I turned.

Her face was uncharacteristically soft, her eyes filled with a painful empathy. "You’ve got this," she said softly, and I knew she wasn’t just talking about finding him.

I wasn’t sure I believed her. I felt like a collection of broken pieces held together by sheer will and desperation. But I nodded anyway, a single, jerky motion, and walked inside.

The hospital lobby was a tomb of quiet luxury, all muted colors, plush carpets, and tasteful art that asked you to ignore the suffering happening behind the scenes. I was a ghost moving through it, my footsteps silent on the thick pile. I was halfway to the elevators, my heart a frantic, wild thing in my chest, when I saw her.

Sarah.