“I’ve still got it.” Her mother laughed, harsh and cruel.

Tears streamed down Nita’s face at her own uselessness.

On the screen, Kovit gasped, hand weakly coming to cover his wound, even as the blood pooled around him.

A sudden sharp pain rocked Nita’s spine, and it took her a heartbeat to realize her mother had pulled the knife out. She immediately started healing the damage.

“Go say goodbye to your little monster. I imagine you’ll need a little bit of alone time to think through things. I’ll be waiting for you in my hotel.” Her mother’s eyes hardened. “Don’t make me wait long.”

Then with a cheery wave, her mother was out the door and gone.

Nita didn’t focus on the future, on what she’d do about her mother, she spent all her energy healing her spine, re-fusing vertebrae and nerves. The moment she could move, she was out the door and smashing into her and Kovit’s room.

Kovit turned to her when she entered, his face spattered with his own blood, eyes unfocused. “Nita?”

“I’m here,” she whispered, yanking out her phone and calling 911. “I’m here, Kovit. It’s going to be okay.”

His eyelashes fluttered like butterfly wings, and he gave her a cracked smile. “I don’t think it is.”

The blood was pooling around him, and the stain on his shirt was a deep, dark red. His chest was rising and falling in jerky motions, and his breathing was wrong. There was a strange, sucking sound coming from his chest when he inhaled, and glops of blood burbled against his shirt.

“Don’t talk like that,” Nita hissed. “You’re going to get through this.”

He just smiled slightly and fumbled for her hand with his bloody one. “Thank you, Nita. For everything.”

“Stop talking like that.” Her voice rose in panic, because the more he spoke, the more real it made things.

His eyes fluttered closed. “It’s okay. This is how it was always going to end for me.”

“Bullshit!” she screamed, hating that he was so accepting, that he wouldn’t fight back against the path that the world had put him on. “That’s bullshit, and you know it!”

But he didn’t respond, his chest gasping and gaping, and his head lolling limply.

Then she was connected to the emergency line, and she had to listen to them rather than to Kovit. She covered his wound with a piece of duct tape to keep the blood in and the air out. The person on the other end of the line was calm and collected even as they said things like “punctured lung” and “sucking wound” and “critical condition.”