A few weeks passed. The world outside marched on, indifferent. But within the sterile walls of the ward. Lili had built her barricade. Not once had her voice stirred the air unless the doctors demanded it and even then, mostly all she gave were nods or shakes of the head granting just enough movement to prove she was still breathing. But she wasn’t really there. Her body remained, curled beneath blankets and wounds, but her spirit had retreated—buried beneath thick layers of silence and shame.
One day Lili stood near the glass. Her fingers barely brushed the frame, but her eyes were far away following thoughts too tangled to unravel.
A knock tapped softly against the door.
She didn’t turn. The rhythm was familiar. The door creaked open a moment later. Margherita lingered in the doorway, breath catching slightly. It was the first time she’d seen Lili out of bed.
“Hello, Lili,” Margherita said gently.
No reply came.
“Mike and Notori would like to visit you,” Margherita continued after a pause, stepping further into the room. “They have a few questions to ask. But only if you feel up to it.”
Lili didn’t turn. Her gaze remained tethered to the storm-grey sky. But after a small, weighty pause, her voice finally broke the silence.
“I don’t mind,” she said—softly, but with something solid beneath it.
Margherita nodded once, more to herself than Lili, and quietly stepped out to let the others know.
The knock came again, softer this time, more hesitant as if the visitors behind it knew they were stepping across fragile lines. Lili didn’t move from the window, though her hands tensed slightly at her sides.
Mike entered first with eyes that carried a strange blend of worry and relief. Notori followed close behind, more restrained, more watchful, his gaze darting briefly to the faint lines still wrapped around Lili’s wrists.
Lili finally slowly turned towards them. Her eyes weren’t accusing. Nor were they trusting. They were simply tired.
“Hello,” Mike said, his voice careful, as if one wrong tone might shatter her.
She offered a barely perceptible nod.
“You said we could come,” Notori added, stepping forward a bit. “So… we did.”
Margherita remained near the door while Lili’s gaze flicked between the two men.
“What do you want to ask?” Her voice was quiet, but steady.
Mike exchanged a glance with Notori, then took a steadying breath, anchoring his voice in quiet gentleness. “We need to know what you remember. About the night you were taken.”
Her frame tensed, the stiffness in her shoulders rippling down to her fingers, clenched slightly at her sides. Her lips pressed into a thin line, jaw tightening. She didn’t speak right away.
“It was the same day I…” Her voice cracked faintly, caught between breath and memory. “The same day I hurt Colin.” Beneath her voice thick guilt fractured. “It had been nine days already,” she continued, her voice quieter, eyes distant. “Nine days since I disappeared from the mafia’s radar. Their car found me. Just… pulled up beside me on the street.” She inhaled sharply, as if bracing herself against the memory. Her hand curled into a fist. “I didn’t know what to feel. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know if they were there to punish me or forgive me. And after what I did to my father…” Her breath hitched. “I didn’t know where else to go. So I got in.”
A heavy silence followed, dense as fog. Mike’s jaw clenched. Notori’s eyes didn’t leave Lili, but his posture spoke the strain he wouldn’t let show.
“It was Fosin,” Lili continued, voice growing colder now, steadier in that dangerous way survivors speak. “He brought me back to Torin’s mansion. At first… it was nothing. Just a few guards at the door. Locked halls. Usual threats.” Then her voice darkened, dipped into something deeper. “But after the video aired—after you stood in front of the cameras, Notori. You and Astonia.” Her gaze flicked briefly over her shoulder, a shard of betrayal in her eyes. “They realized I knew about my parents.” She turned back to the window. “Torin demanded proof of loyalty. I didn’t do it.” Her voice cracked, not with fear, but fury. At herself. At them. At everything. “I hesitated. I turned to leave. I thought I could get out before they moved.” She drew a sharp breath. “They attacked first. I killed the guards. I almost made it to the door. And then—” She paused. Her next words were jagged, cut raw. “Torin shot me.”
Her hand drifted to her side, instinctively brushing the place where the pain had lived. “When I woke up, I was in the cell. And that’s when it really began.” Her eyes dimmed, as if she were seeing those walls again, those hours stitched in agony. “The torture. The questions. They wanted to break me. Or maybe just remind me what I truly was. Or both…”
She didn’t cry. But the silence that followed was heavier than tears.
Lili turned at last. Slowly, as if the motion itself cost her more than she had left to give. The weight of weeks sat on her shoulders, but her eyes were no longer clouded—they were clear, unflinching and hollow with a truth she had finally stopped outrunning.
“To be honest with you,” she began, her voice quiet but without tremor, “when I tried to kill myself, it wasn’t just to escape the pain. It was to escape what I knew would follow.” Her gaze swept between them—Mike’s grief-hardened features, Notori’s tightened jaw, and finally to the silence that waited between them like an open door. “I’m a criminal,” she continued. “We all know that. We all know what kind of choices people like me get next.” She sighed. Not the sigh of defeat—but of someone too tired to pretend, too honest to dress her shame in denial. “So let’s just get this over with. You can take me. Question me. Do whatever you came to do.” Her fingers curled slightly at her sides. She didn’t shake. She didn’t flinch. “I don’t want anything in return,” she said. “It’s disgusting even to think about trading this information for anything else.”
Mike shifted, glancing at Notori, then back at her. “Are you sure you’re well enough for this?” he asked, the hesitation thick in his voice, like he was weighing her fragility against the urgency pressing in on all sides.
“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Lili answered without pause. “This is the best time you’ll have. They’ll come for me eventually. You won’t even realize it happened until it’s too late. So…” she looked between them, jaw clenched, “use me while you still can.”
Notori shifted beside Mike, a flicker of something breaking through his carefully guarded expression. “Lili, we aren’t—” he began, his voice tinged with protest, with something almost wounded.
But Mike raised a hand, silencing him before the sentence could finish. His eyes didn’t leave Lili. “Okay,” he said softly. “Lili.”
He turned toward the door, where Margherita still lingered. “Could you bring her a set of clothes, please?”
Margherita nodded once and stepped out quietly.
As soon as the door clicked shut behind her, something in Lili shifted. Her breath caught, her spine straightened too suddenly. Her eyes widened, panic flashing through them. She tried to bury it—tried to tuck it beneath her usual frost—but it was there. She hadn’t expected to be afraid of them. But the memory of men circling around her in dark room was too loud inside her.
“Shit…” she whispered, barely more than breath, and turned away—shoulders curled in like she could fold herself out of existence.
Mike saw it. And in a move that cost him more than words ever could, he stepped back. “We’ll wait outside,” he said gently, and didn’t wait for a response. He simply turned and walked out. Notori’s eyes lingered on her for just a second longer before the door closed again.
***
Lili stepped out of the ward dressed in simple clothes. Mike and Notori were waiting just outside. Every step she took peeled back another layer of her resolve. Her hands trembled at her sides, but she bit down lightly on her lower lip.
Mike nodded without a word, leading the way with the ease. His pace was patient, never too far ahead, never too close. Notori lingered, watching her with eyes that flickered between guilt and protection. He hesitated at the car, one hand ghosting near the passenger door, but then without saying a word he changed course. He opened the back door instead and slid in beside her. Lili flinched, just slightly, but she didn’t protest.
She just sat there, spine stiff, hands clenched in her lap, her gaze fixed on the glass where her own reflection didn’t quite meet her eyes. And beside her, Notori didn’t speak. He didn’t ask if she was okay. He didn’t offer promises he couldn’t keep. And in a world that had taken too much, that small presence was the closest thing to mercy she’d felt in a long time.
The car moved through the soft hush of the early afternoon, the city’s sounds muffled by the thick glass, by the heavy silence that wrapped itself around them.
Lili’s breath came shallow and uneven, as if every inhale had to claw its way past memories she hadn’t invited. Her hands trembled more. Her skin, usually so unreadable, had turned pale. Mike caught a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror. Her eyes weren’t teary. Something colder settled in them. Not grief. Not fear. Readiness.He slowed slightly, then spoke: “We won’t hurt you, Lili,” he said.
“I know that.” Her answer came almost too quickly. “But that doesn’t make it easier,” she added, voice lower now, almost to herself. “Knowing doesn’t change what the body remembers.”
The silence that followed was heavier. Notori didn’t look at her, but he reached into his coat and pulled out a small bottle of water and offered it to her. Lili didn’t take it. But she looked at it. And that was something.
“Why did you come?” she asked finally. “To see the damage? Or to clean it up?”
Notori glanced her way. “To walk with you through what’s left.”
She didn’t answer. She just turned her face back toward the window, where a smear of sun fell across the glass.
And when the silence grew too heavy to hold, her breath hitched—and a single quiet tear traced the curve of her cheek. Another followed. Then another.
Notori’s gaze slid toward her. “What is it?”
Lili didn’t answer right away. She brought a hand to her face, as if embarrassed to be seen unraveling. But it was too late. The truth had already begun to spill.
“It’s just…” Her voice cracked softly. “I’m happy I didn’t make another mistake.” She swallowed hard, looking down at her lap, the tears still coming. “In the long list of things I’ve done,” she continued, quieter now, “I thought I’d added something I could never take back. I really thought I killed him… my father.” She stumbled over the word “father,” as if it didn’t quite belong in her voice.
Notori didn’t speak. Instead, he gently reached across the space between them and set the water bottle down beside her on the seat. Mike said nothing from the front, but his grip on the wheel tightened ever so slightly,.
“You warned him. That matters, Lili. More than you think.” Notori said softly.
She didn’t answer, but she nodded toward Notori words.
Finally, the car rolled to a stop in front of a quiet apartment complex. Its brick facade glowed warm in the afternoon light, a stark contrast to the chill knotting in Lili’s chest. Her brows drew tight as she looked between Mike and Notori, confusion etched in every line of her face.
“What is this?” she asked cautious.
Mike glanced over his shoulder, offering a small and uncertain smile. “Listen, Lili… You need to make it right with your parents.”
Her breath hitched. “This wasn’t our deal,” she snapped, but the heat in her voice cracked beneath the weight of her fear.
“No, it wasn’t,” Mike agreed quietly. “But Lili… they deserve your honesty. Even if it’s hard. Even if it hurts.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed, horror slowly unfurling inside her. “You don’t get it. If I stay close to them, they’ll come for them too!” Her voice rose in desperation.
“Your parents are Gifted,” Notori said calmly from beside her. “And we’ll protect them if it comes to that.”
Lili shook her head, her breath quick and shallow, each inhale catching in her chest. “I didn’t even deserve any of this,” she murmured, her voice a breath away from breaking. “Not their love. Not your help. Not this chance…”
Mike’s reply was soft. “Maybe not,” he said, “but you’re still here. That means something.”
A bitter laugh scraped from her throat. “Yeah?” Her gaze snapped to him, eyes burning with unshed tears, mouth curling into something too sharp to be a smile. “What about the people I killed, Mike? Did they get a second chance too?”
The silence that followed was heavy with the weight of truth. Even Notori looked down.
“No,” Mike said at last. “They didn’t. And nothing you do now will change that.” Lili flinched but he didn’t stop there. “But maybe the next person you stand in front of won’t die. Maybe the next lie you refuse to tell saves someone else from bleeding for it.”
Lili looked away, pressing her fingers to her eyes. Her hands still trembled.
“You don’t owe anyone forgiveness,” Mike continued. “But you can choose what you owe yourself. And if there’s still a part of you that wants to face them, then that part deserves a voice.”
“Jesus,” Lili muttered under her breath, the frustration and disbelief pooling behind her eyes. “What is wrong with you people…” Her voice wasn’t loud, but it cracked at the edges.
With a sharp exhale, she opened the car door and stepped out. The apartment complex rose ahead. Mike and Notori followed suit, closing their doors with soft clicks that seemed louder in the stillness. Lili didn’t move at first. She just stood there, arms crossed tight across her chest, staring at the building.
“They’re waiting,” Mike said quietly.
After a moment, Lili let out another breath, steadied her hands, and started walking. Not toward comfort. Not toward forgiveness. But toward something that might hurt before it healed…
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