Chapter 76: 76
"Zamiel!"
Nix burst into the office without knocking, the door slamming against the wall with a sharp crack. His expression was dark, his voice tight with fury.
Zamiel, who had been giving instructions to a nurse, turned sharply. His brows furrowed as he met Nix’s blazing stare. Without a word, he waved a hand, dismissing the nurses from the room. They left hurriedly, shutting the door behind them and leaving a heavy silence in their wake.
"Where is Carmela?" Nix demanded, his voice low but trembling with restrained anger.
Zamiel straightened slowly, stepping closer until they stood nearly face to face. "Lower your voice," he said coldly, his tone a warning. "This is a hospital."
"I don’t care!" Nix snapped. "I don’t care what you’re hiding or why you don’t want to tell me but I won’t tolerate my wife disappe.."
"Your wife, you say?" Zamiel interrupted with a scoff, a bitter smile curling his lips. His gaze hardened as he crossed his arms. "Seems you’ve forgotten the deal you signed." Their eyes locked, neither man moving. The air between them felt alive thick with unspoken accusations and barely contained hostility. The hum of the fluorescent lights above seemed to fade, leaving only the sound of their breaths.
It was as if the room itself held its breath, caught in the gravitational pull of their silent clash. Nix’s fists clenched at his sides and Zamiel’s stare was steady, and calculated, the kind that could slice through pretense. For a moment, neither spoke yet their gazes waged a brutal, wordless battle: pride against pride, fury against control.
Finally, Zamiel broke the tension, exhaling through his nose before turning his back on Nix and walking around his desk.
"I remember asking you about your feelings for her," he said, his tone quieter now, but laced with meaning. "You brushed it off then... acted indifferent. But now?" He sat down, eyes flicking up to meet Nix’s. "Now I’m sure you’d burn the world to ashes if she so much as disappears again."
He opened a drawer, pulled out a thick brown file, and tossed it across the desk. The folder slid to a stop at Nix’s hand.
Nix hesitated before picking it up. The papers inside were dense pages of medical data, coded reports, and documents stamped with confidential seals. The handwriting looked rushed, the content chaotic. He flipped through the pages, eyes darting across lines of information that made less and less sense with each turn. His pulse quickened as the words began to blur together, a mix of scientific jargon and symbols that meant nothing to him.
Finally, he slammed the file shut and tossed it back onto the desk.
"What’s the meaning of this?" he demanded, his voice sharp, and jaw tight. His patience was thinning, and the cold glint in his eyes said he was only seconds away from snapping.
"Your darling wife is going to die in four weeks."
The words landed like a physical blow. For a moment the office ceased to exist the hum of the lights, the ticking clock, even Zamiel’s breathing all receded to a distant, muffled haze. Time slowed; each syllable unspooled on its own, heavy and deliberate. Nix felt the world compress into the narrow space between those six words and the hollow that opened in his chest. His legs went numb as though the floor had been pulled from beneath him.
"Wh... what do you mean by that? She... she’s been healthy.. " he stammered, hunting Zamiel’s face for some sign of cruelty or mistake. His voice came out small and raw.
"Healthy?" Zamiel’s laugh was cold and flat. "She’s an excellent actor. You let her perform for you so well that you never suspected anything." He leaned forward, voice steady, with his eyes hard. "The nosebleeds. The fainting. Those weren’t accidents."
Nix saw the memory of the last bleed, the warm trickle, the metallic tang, Carmela’s bewildered eyes and it hit him with the clarity of a slap. The incidents that had seemed episodic and explainable now rearranged themselves into a pattern he had been too willing to ignore. Rage flared, but grief was already moving faster, slick and hot.
"Stop trying to shift the blame." Nix’s words tore out of him. His hands were fists at his sides; his knuckles were white. "Just tell me.. where is Carmela?" He felt the question as a plea, an animal sound from the deepest place in him.
Zamiel’s face was unreadable. "I don’t know." He flicked a remote; the monitor on his desk sprang to life. "But the CCTV shows your dearest wife, my patient, jumping from the window."
He turned the screen toward Nix. On it, grainy footage played back: Carmela stumbling to the ledge, a desperate tilt of her body, then the moment she fell. Time in the video was clinical and pitiless. Nix’s stomach dropped; the room spun. Without another thought he launched himself toward the door.
Zamiel watched him go, and let out a long, controlled breath not an exhalation of sympathy, not an ounce of guilt and then collapsed into his chair and spun it slowly. "Don’t ruin everything, Nix," he muttered, eyes closed. "I finally have all my pawns where I need them." His voice held the bored certainty of a man who’d been planning this for some time.
Outside, the corridor blurred past as Nix ran. In the parking lot the cool air hit his face like a physical shock. He fumbled for his phone with shaking hands and opened the tracking app that had been installed on Carmela’s during that night, the night Moreau had died.
His thumb flew over the screen. The app pinged once, twice, last known location: a cluster of GPS coordinates feeding into a map. The blue dot showed movement, a small trail that had started near the hospital and then gone weak. He cross-referenced the timestamps against the CCTV timecode Zamiel had shown him. The trail fuzzed out at a bridge three kilometers away, a faded breadcrumb of signal strength that kicked and died like a sputtering light.
Heart hammering, he zoomed in. The map revealed a narrow lane that ran along the river, a footpath that cut through scrub and old warehouses, places people went when they wanted to vanish. The signal showed a brief pause, a jump; then nothing.
Nix’s hands tightened on the phone until the screen dimmed. Anger reared, hot and immediate, but beneath it was something more combustible: terror braided with resolve. He slammed the phone shut and sprinted for his car, each step a vow. Four weeks. Four words. He would not let a calendar sentence become a sentence for his wife.
But could he really do that?
Could he truly save her from the world, from fate, from herself?
The question clawed through his mind as he slammed his foot on the accelerator, the tires screeching against the asphalt. The morning blurred past in streaks of color and light, his heart pounding so violently he could barely hear his own desperate breaths. The steering wheel trembled under his grip, slick with sweat, as he whispered broken prayers into the hum of the engine.
"Carmela... please don’t do anything stupid... please," he muttered, voice cracking as the words dissolved into the roar of the wind rushing through the half-open window. He didn’t even realize tears had begun to gather in his eyes hot, and blinding until one slipped down his cheek and blurred his vision.
Then, finally, he saw her.
At first, she was just a small silhouette against the fading sky, fragile, and wavering, standing too close to the edge of the cliff. His heart froze.
"Carmela!"
Her name tore out of him, raw and trembling, as he flung the door open before the car even stopped. He sprinted forward, stumbling on the uneven ground. The wind carried the sharp scent of iron, and when she turned, the sight knocked the air out of him.
Her shirt was drenched, heavy and clinging to her body, soaked through with blood that glistened under the dying sun. It wasn’t just one wound there were several, each one a dark, spreading bloom. Her face was pale, her lips trembling as she tried to muster a weak smile that only deepened his despair.
"Carmela, no.. " he breathed, pushing his legs harder, but it was as if the world had shifted against him. Every step felt dragged through quicksand, every breath labored and sharp. Time itself seemed to distort the air thickened, the distance between them stretching wider and wider even as he ran.
"Please... just hold on," he gasped.
Her eyes met his wide, glassy, and filled with something between sorrow and relief. A faint, trembling whisper left her lips, carried away by the wind before it could reach him. And then, as if the world itself had slowed to a single frame, she stumbled backward.
"No!"
He lunged forward, stretching out his hand, their fingers brushed for the briefest, cruelest moment, the warmth of her skin barely grazing his before she slipped away. The echo of that fleeting touch burned into his palm as he watched her fall, her body disappearing into the fog that rose from the ravine below.
The world went silent.
For a heartbeat, everything stilled the wind, the rustling leaves, even his own breath. Then came the deafening rush of air, the echo of her name tearing from his throat as he fell to his knees at the cliff’s edge.
The space between them had never felt wider, nor the world so unbearably cruel.
He had lost her.. forever