I close him out.
"Syn, you need to come back, you need to wake up and eat. You're wasting away. It's been a days now. We have to bury her soon, you have to be there to let her go," Adrian whispered as he holds my hand tightly.
I close my eyes and sink back inside.
Hands touch my face. I open my eyes as Ryder and Eliran stick plastic devices to my forehead and click on a machine. "She is in there, see these waves here?" Eliran speaks to Ryder. I go back inside, "What the hell?"
"What?" Ryder demands.
"It's like she just completely shut off, I've never seen anything like it. There are no brain waves. She's gone."
"Gone how?" Ryder explodes.
"Like she's dead, but she still has a pulse," Eliran says as his hands grab my face and searches it. I open my mind, his machine beeps, I close them…it goes silent. I like the silence of my mind. I go there. Hiding.
I wake up. Ryder's holding me in his lap. His nose buried in my hair. He's whispering encouraging words and then nonsense, words that bring me to the surface but won't allow me breech it. I'm safer inside. I'm not ready to break through. "I need you to wake up. Your friends have been mucking up my home. They refuse to leave, or bury Larissa. You’re strong enough for this Pet, I need you to wake up. I need you to stop shutting down, or I'm coming in there to get you."
I close him out.
Alden comes. He whispers and rubs my hands together. Comments to Adam about body heat, I'm not controlling it. I'm losing more than retaining now. I shut him out. I failed him too.
"Syn," Ryder's voice shakes me.
I turn around to see him standing in the darkness with me. He's dressed in his cloak blending in with my darkness. He steps from the shadows and examines me closely. I don’t speak, I don’t need words here. I slide down the wall of my mind to sit again.
He strides forward and does the same, sitting beside me, his hands finding mine and holding them. Comforting and yet not forceful. "Adam needs you Syn, he's grieving. They need to bury Larissa soon. They're scared and need you right now."
I turn and take him in, his eyes look tired. And his hair is a mess, as if he's been running his hands through it for days without brushing it. Dark circles surround his eyes as they flow over me carefully. Studying me. "I need you Syn, need you to help me break the fucker who did this. He's alive. I need you to come back to me, can you do it Syn?"
I can't breathe.
My heart kicks into overdrive pounding relentlessly in my chest.
I watched him die, I watched Ryder kill him.
I blink and cry out as everything comes back. The pain. The agony. Larissa is dead—because I failed. Tears burn my eyes and I try to hold on to Ryder's hand but he's gone and once again I am alone in the darkness. But now, I can see light.
Someone is crying, screaming with pain so deep, raw and utterly bare that it consumes and takes a hold of me. Hands pull me close as more tortured screaming erupts from within the room that sound like a wounded animal. My ears bleed from it. The pain is too much, the shaking is too much.
"What's wrong with her?" Alden demands.
"She's waking up," Ryder replies from where he's holding my tortured soul as it emerges from the depths of despair it had been locked inside. His arms tighten around me, his scent calming but nothing takes away the pain of knowing I failed Larissa and she died because of it.
I blink as feelings of pain wash through me. I claw at my mind demanding it let me go, let me out. The screaming in the room is me, it's my own. I sob, my entire body shaking against Ryder as he holds me against him. Adam is trying to hold my pain away with the bond but he cannot, he releases it with a shudder the instant he felt it.
"Put her to sleep, fuck, it's too much—too much pain!" Adam snarls, his body shivering from the pain he's tasting from inside of me.
I push away from Ryder and look around the room as the scream subsides. I fight my breathing and my mind as it tries to fracture again. I meet Adam's horrified eyes, he knows what I felt and I hate it. They didn’t tell him what happened inside that room…he knows now, he saw it when he tried to pull my pain away, it's playing on repeat inside my head. He shouldn't have tried.
The room is full of my friends and Ryder's men. They pity me for what I will have to endure, what I have to live with. "Where is she?" I demand to know.
"Syn…" Alden says softly as if calming a child.
"Fuck. That. Where is she?"
"She's dead," Ryder says.
"I—," my voice cracks and I shake it off. I fight the tears and the nausea that threatens to come out, "I know. Where is her soul?" I meet no one's eyes. I don’t want pity right now. I want to know where her soul is.
"We don’t know. We couldn’t find it." Adrian says watching me.