26. WITHIN THE WALLS
I heard myself screaming, but the only words I could make out were the ones in my head.
I was back inside my mother’s closet again, helpless and terrified—the memories battering me one after another. Darkness pressing in from all sides, heavy and suffocating. My ragged breathing. The smell of mothballs and cedar. Smooth wood under my hands as I ran them over the walls.
Now I was trapped again.
I clawed at the wood, splinters digging underneath my fingernails and shredding my skin. Ignoring the pain, I pounded and prayed for one of the boards to break. Though I could barely see him, I felt Jared’s hands scratching and banging alongside mine.
“How are we going to get out?” My voice echoed back at me.
“The nails are too strong. He must be holding them in place.”
Jared stopped fighting and turned to face me. He wrapped his arms around my neck and pulled me against him. “It’s gonna be okay.” He tried to sound convincing, but our bodies were too close to lie. His heart was pounding even harder than mine.
My head rested against Jared’s chest, and I listened to the sound of his breathing. It was too fast, like his heartbeat.
He leaned down, his mouth on my ear. “I’m not gonna let anything happen to you. I’ll get us out of this. I promise.”
I took a deep breath, my face still buried in his shirt. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
He took my face in his hands and raised my chin with his thumb. “I want you to know I’d never do that.”
I nodded, too frightened to know anything.
“Give me your radio,” he said. “I dropped mine fighting with the dead kid.”
I dug it out of my pocket and slid it between us. Jared rested his arms around my neck, toying with the dials. He pressed the button over and over, repeating the same thing. “Lukas? Priest? Alara? Anyone there?”
“We’re inside a wall. You won’t get any reception.” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to cry.
“It doesn’t matter. When we don’t show up, they’ll look for us.”
I shook my head and tears spilled down my cheeks. “I don’t want them to.”
“Why not?”
If they came down here, they might get hurt. There were so many spirits and no way to predict what could happen if those traumatized children felt threatened. The boy with the sledgehammer had probably been as docile as the rest of them once.
I pressed my face against Jared’s chest and tried to catch my breath.
“Kennedy, are you crying?” He pulled back, trying to look at me even though there was no way he could see me in the dark.
“No.”
He pulled me tighter, resting his chin on the top of my head. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve let you go with Lukas.”
“There’s no way you could have known.”
Jared took a shuddering breath. “He’s the better half. I’m the screwup. No matter what I do.”
I laid my palms against his chest. “You protect everyone.”
His breath caught and the person who seemed so unbreakable finally broke.
“Is that what you think? If you knew the truth, you’d never say that. I screwed up. Worse than this.” His chest heaved. “Worse than anything.”
I reached up and touched his damp cheeks. “It can’t be that bad—”
Jared caught my wrists in his hands and held them tight. “It is that bad.
He was coming apart, the way I had so many times. “That’s not true. Whatever it is—”
Jared exploded. “I killed our parents—yours, mine, all of them. It’s my fault they’re dead. Do you want to be close to me now?”
I heard the words, but they didn’t make sense. “What are you talking about? You didn’t even know my mom.”
“No. But I wanted to.” Jared pressed his face into my hands, still holding my wrists. “I wanted to find all the members of the Legion. I thought they’d be stronger together, like the journals say. I didn’t believe my dad when he told me Andras was always hunting them—that it was too risky. So I started researching on my own, piecing together information from conversations I overheard between my dad and my uncle with things my father had told me. If I didn’t have two family members in the Legion, I probably never would’ve figured it out. But I found them all. Even your mom, the one nobody else could find.”
“How?”
“My uncle was looking for the member who dropped off the grid. One day, I heard him tell my dad that he’d figured out she was a woman, living in the DC area with her daughter. I went through his desk and found her name—and yours.”
“What are you saying?” My voice sounded distant and muffled, like it belonged to someone else and I was eavesdropping on the conversation.
Jared’s tears ran down my hands. “I made a list of all the names. I was gonna show it to my dad. The next day, he was dead. They were all dead. And suddenly we were the Legion.”
I knew it was true, but I couldn’t hate him.
Jared’s father hid something from him, and he went looking for answers. How many times had I searched for the note my father wrote, the one I saw perfectly every time I closed my eyes? My mother had never let me see it again after the day he left, and it had only made me search harder.
I would have looked for them, too.
My body shook as I cried. This time I couldn’t pretend, and I couldn’t stop. Jared let go of my wrists, trying to create space between us, but it was impossible.
There was no space between us—inside or outside these walls.
“I know you’ll never be able to forgive me. My own brother hates me,” he said.
It all made sense. The tension between them—the unspoken anger simmering below the surface—it was about so much more than their father choosing Jared to take his place in the Legion… or me.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could take it back,” Jared whispered, his voice hoarse. “All I want to do is be near you, and I don’t deserve to be.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry—”
I shook my head. “No. The other thing.”
Jared stilled and put his hands flat against the boards behind me, with my face between them. I couldn’t see him in the darkness, but I could feel him watching me cry.
Seeing me—the person I tried so hard to hide from the world and replace with someone better.
“All I want to do is be near you.” He spoke the words slowly, his face so close I could feel his breath on my skin and smell the salt on his. “Kennedy, what do you want?”
The question lingered between us, tearing me apart. But I couldn’t make myself say the words, no matter how many times I repeated them in my head. “It doesn’t make a difference.”
“It makes a difference to me.” His voice was raw and deep.
“I want to matter. I want to be the kind of girl someone can’t just walk away from and forget.”
He ran his thumb down the center of my bottom lip. “No one could ever forget you.”
Something inside me gave way, and I started sobbing.
