Squeeze her hand and tell her you're sorry—you're here now, and you're not going anywhere.Ask her what happened after you blacked out—did she get Marco? Is it really over?

You squeeze her hand. Your grip is pathetic—the muscles in your forearm feel like wet paper—but you close your fingers around hers and hold on, and the small pressure is enough to make her breath hitch.

"I'm sorry," you say. Your voice is still raw, still scraped thin, but the words come out steady. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."

Her face crumples. Not the controlled, fighting-it-back compression from before—this is the real thing, the full collapse, and she folds forward until her forehead rests against your chest. Her shoulders shake. The t-shirt—your t-shirt—rides up her back as she curls into you, and you can feel the knobs of her spine through the fabric, the heat of her skin, the way her ribs expand and contract with each ragged breath. She's lost weight. Four days of barely eating while she watched you sleep.

You lift your free hand—it takes monumental effort, your arm trembling the whole way—and rest it on the back of her head. Her hair is unwashed, slightly oily beneath your palm, and the elastic holding her bun has gone loose. You don't say anything. You just hold her there against you while she cries, and the morning sun paints warm stripes across the bedsheet and the sound of traffic drifts up from the street below.

She cries for a long time. Not dramatically—no wailing, no theatrics. Just a quiet, exhausted weeping, the kind that comes after the crisis is over and the body finally has permission to break down. Her tears soak through the gauze on your chest—you didn't realize there was gauze on your chest too, probably from where you hit the concrete—and her fingers dig into the bedsheet on either side of your ribs.

Eventually the shaking subsides. She sniffs. Hard. Wipes her nose on the hem of the t-shirt with zero self-consciousness, and lifts her head. Her eyes are swollen, red-rimmed, her nose pink and raw. She looks like she hasn't slept properly in days. She looks terrible. She looks alive.

"Okay," she says thickly. "Okay. I'm done. That's it. No more crying." She drags the back of her wrist across her cheek. "That was disgusting. Forget you saw that."

"Saw what?" you say.

The corner of her mouth twitches. Not quite a smile—more the ghost of one, the architectural foundation where a smile might eventually be built.

You take a slow breath. The ache in your skull pulses with your heartbeat, a low thudding metronome. "Lina. What happened? After I went down—did you get him? Is Marco—"

"Dead," she says. The word drops from her mouth like a stone into still water. No hesitation, no dramatic pause. Just a flat, tired fact. "He's dead. They're all dead. Every single one of them."

She straightens up on the edge of the bed and tucks one leg beneath her, her knee pressing against your hip through the sheet. Her hand stays in yours.

"After you—after Tomasz hit you—" She pauses. Swallows. "The sonic things they had were messing with my head. Couldn't think straight. Couldn't focus enough to reach anyone beyond about fifty feet. Marco had this—this glove thing on his hand, some kind of mechanical grip. He grabbed my throat while I was pinned down." Her free hand drifts absently to her neck, fingers touching the skin there as though checking for bruises that have long since faded. "He told me to show him my real face or he'd have Tomasz shoot you in the head."

"And then I heard you," she says quietly. "Telling me not to. Bleeding all over the floor, barely conscious, and you were trying to protect me." Her jaw tightens. "Something just... broke. Inside me. Not in a bad way. In a—" She makes a frustrated sound. "I don't know how to explain it. Everything just went white. I screamed, and the scream wasn't just sound. It went out through every direction at once, and the sonic machines just... died. Fried. Sparks everywhere."

She looks at you, and her brown eyes are steady now, dried of tears, carrying something harder underneath.

"After that it was fast. Maybe ten seconds. I killed everyone in the room. All fourteen of them. Tomasz—the one who hit you—I made sure he felt it." No remorse. No apology. A statement of completed business. "Then Marco tried to buy his way out. Offered me gold bars. Cash. Begged me to let him walk."

Her expression doesn't change.

"I told him who I was. I told him Jane's name. And then I turned his brain into soup."

The silence that follows is filled with morning sounds—a car horn, a bird on the fire escape, the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. Ordinary sounds from an ordinary world that neither of you quite belongs to anymore.

"It's over, Sam," Lina says. Her thumb traces a slow circle on the back of your hand. "Marco's dead. His operation is gone. Every hideout, every guard, every last piece of it. Jane's avenged." She pauses. "The news is calling it a gang massacre. No suspects. Nobody's coming for us."

She shifts her weight on the bed, and the mattress creaks, and she looks down at your joined hands with an expression you can't quite read—something between exhaustion and wonder, like someone standing in the ruins of a house they burned down, surprised to find a flower growing in the ash.

"So yeah," she says softly. "It's really over."