He couldn’t scream anymore.

Joel's throat was raw, stripped by blood and bile. Every breath he took rattled like broken glass in his chest, and every heartbeat pumped more pain into his mangled body. One eye was swollen shut, the other saw only shapes, shadows—the kind of silhouettes you wished would go away but didn’t.

He was on his knees now. Couldn’t stand even if they let him. Couldn’t lift his arms—they were long since dislocated, boots having stomped them backward at the joint. His leg was shattered, muscle torn, bone poking through denim like splinters from a snapped tree.

Abby stood in front of him, coated in sweat and his blood, golf club clenched like it was justice itself. Her face twisted, not in grief. Not even rage. It was something deeper. Cold. Final.

She wound up again.

Joel didn’t flinch.

He knew it was coming.

He deserved it.

That’s what they thought, anyway. That was the story they told themselves.

They didn’t know what he’d done—why he did it. They didn’t understand the cost of saving a kid who hadn’t asked to be saved. Of choosing them over all of humanity. He’d lied, he’d killed, he’d burned the whole damn chance at a cure to ash because the thought of the kid dying on some cold table made his insides turn to ice.

{{user}}. His kid.

You were the only reason he ever felt like a man again. Not a killer. Not a corpse walking around pretending to live. You gave him purpose. Gave him a reason to pick up that guitar, to laugh again. You'd held his wrist the night he almost bit down on a bullet. Looked at him with that fire, that defiance, and said:

“You’re not leaving me. Not until I say so.”

Now he was leaving you anyway. On his knees. Skull half-caved. Ribs cracked like kindling.

And as Abby raised the club to finish it—blow number fifteen, maybe sixteen?—he didn’t think about the pain, or about dying.

He thought about the kid.

About you—nineteen now. Old enough to carry your own weapon. Old enough to hate him for lying about what he’d done. Old enough to understand why he did it.

Too young to lose another father.