Page 180 of Carrick
This was no longer just a blast site.
It was a graveyard.
And not just for Rayden. For the illusion of control. For whatever threadbare hope we’d clung to that we could keep this war on our terms.
I stood at the edge of the blast radius and let the silence close in around me, thick and unforgiving. It settled on my shoulders like ash, on my tongue like rust. My lungs resisted every inhale, fighting to reject the scent—burned oil, twisted metal, melted rubber, and something else. Something unmistakable.
Flesh.
That smell would follow me. It always did. But this time, it carried a name.
Rayden.
And I’d failed him.
Minutes ago, he was alive—not metaphorically, not symbolically, but fully, undeniably alive. Breathing. Speaking. Standing with uncertainty in his eyes and too many truths left unspoken. That version of him no longer existed. No scream marked his end. No body remained. There was no heroic finalact, no dramatic farewell—only vapor in the air, silence where a heartbeat should’ve been, and the wreckage of what should have been, reduced to shrapnel and a dark stain on the pavement.
I moved forward because standing still felt like surrender. My boots crunched over ruined gravel, the stone brittle underfoot, as if even the ground had given up holding things together. The heat grew sharper as I neared the blast, rising in pulsing waves that curled around my legs and slipped beneath my collar. The closer I got, the less it looked like a car and more like a sculpture of failure—twisted, collapsed, melted in on itself like something ashamed to exist.
I knelt beside what might have once been the front axle. Or the bumper. It was hard to tell—so much of it was gone. Warped metal curled like petals, folding outward, each piece glinting faintly beneath a smear of soot. The fire still clung to the seams, tiny, defiant licks of orange burning at the edges, like it wasn’t quite ready to relinquish the last of him.
Glancing down, I saw something that didn’t match the rest of the carnage.
A glint. A shape.
I pulled it free with care I didn’t feel and brought it into the moonlight.
A metal keychain, or what was left of one. It was burned, mangled, and half melted. I flipped it over, almost dropping it back into the wreckage, and then froze.
Carved into the other side, partially destroyed, were the letters BELL.
It had said Bellamy. Rayden’s keychain, something he wore to remind him of her. Now, maybe the very last thing that connected them. I slipped it into the inner pocket of my jacket, close to my heart, like proximity could absolve me of anything.
But nothing would. Nothing ever had.
Behind me, Quinn still hadn’t moved. I didn’t need to turn to feel him there. He was a weight in the air, carved in shock and silence, a man halfway between denial and comprehension. I heard the click of his phone unlocking. Then nothing. No call. No words. Just the quiet devastation of someone trying to understand what kind of war we’d just walked into.
“He had no idea what was coming,” I said, my voice a rasp scraped from inside my chest. “He was completely oblivious.”
Quinn didn’t answer. Just stood there, barely breathing.
I stood slowly, joints stiff, skin too tight, every ache born not of injury—but of rage, of loss, of guilt lodged deep in the bone.
We trudged toward the cars without a word, the silence between us loud enough to bruise. Gravel cracked underfoot, loose and sharp, like even the ground didn’t want to hold the weight of what we carried. Firelight threw our shadows long and broken across rusted metal, twisting our outlines into something unrecognizable—ghosts of people who’d already lost too much. Smoke slithered low, curling between our legs like a warning, thick with the stink of ash and failure, clinging like guilt we’d never wash off.
At the edge of the lot, Quinn paused, and I finally got a good look at him. He was pale under the flickering glow of firelight, eyes bloodshot, mouth set in something that wasn’t quite grief but wasn’t far from it either. He was bleeding in several places, most notably his left shoulder, where it looked like a piece of molten shrapnel had sliced through his deltoid, leaving a deep, jagged gash that was bleeding freely. I was intensely aware of how lucky I had been to only get a cut on my cheek.
“They’ll know we were here,” he said, pressing a gauze pad to his wound to slow the bleeding. It’s all we could do for now; we hadn’t brought a first aid kit hefty enough to handle something so severe.
“They already do.”
“You think this was just retaliation?”
“No,” I replied, staring back at the blast site. “This was ademonstration. A line in the sand, written in bone and gasoline.”
He nodded. Once. Shallow.
We drove away with fire in the rearview and ash in our lungs, the kind of silence between us that didn’t soothe—it seethed. Behind us, the wreckage smoldered. Nothing left to save. Nothing left to bury. Just scorched earth and a memory burned too deep to forget.
