The Day My Survival Score Reached Zero Chapter 08
Luca had been my hidden target once, the one I never managed to approach. Back then, every time I tried to get close, he disappeared. Sometimes I saw him with Sophia, sometimes I found him watching me from across a room, but he never stayed long enough for me to ask why.
So I gave up on him and chose Adrian instead.
Now he drove through the sleeping city with one hand on the wheel, his stolen orderly’s badge lying on the dashboard. The streetlights slid across his face, and for a moment he looked exactly like the boy I used to know: quiet, distant, carrying a tenderness he refused to let anyone see.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I came too late.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
It was more than fine.
Because he had brought me out.
Because now I could finally leave.
I asked him to take me somewhere open, somewhere that did not smell like disinfectant or locked doors, so Luca drove me to the lakefront before dawn. The city was still dark, the water black and calm, and the wind moved through my hair like it was trying to wake me from a dream.
After that, we went wherever I asked.
A closed diner where the owner knew Luca and gave us coffee without asking questions. An old movie theater with only two people in the back row. A planetarium that had not changed since our college years, where fake stars moved slowly across the ceiling and made the world feel less cruel than it was.
For the first time in days, no one watched my pulse.
No one told me to behave.
No one asked me to apologize to Sophia.
Luca stayed beside me the whole time, close enough to catch me if I fell, but never close enough to make me feel trapped.
Near midnight, we returned to the lake.
I sat on the hood of his car and looked at the dark water. The medication I had hidden from the facility was still in my pocket, wrapped in a folded tissue.
Luca looked at me for a long time.
“I know what you’re planning,” he said.
My fingers stilled.
He did not reach for my hand or try to take anything from me. His eyes were red, but his voice stayed calm.
“I won’t stop you,” he said. “Not because I want you gone, but because I know staying here has become another kind of death for you.”
Something in my chest broke quietly.
All this time, everyone had tried to save my body while ignoring the part of me that had already collapsed.
Only Luca understood.
“Were you ever going to tell me why you kept running from me?” I asked.
He looked away.
“One day,” he said. “If we get another world.”
I smiled faintly. “Another world where we’re the leads?”
His throat moved.
“Maybe.”
I leaned against his shoulder and closed my eyes. He smelled faintly of cedar, the same scent he used in college, the one I ha
once told him suited him.
“Thank you, Luca.”
“For what?”
“For letting me be tired.”
He did not answer.
A little later, I took out what I had hidden.
Luca’s hand tightened beside mine, but he still did not stop me. When the cold began to spread through my body, he pulled me into his arms and held me as if he could keep all the broken pieces together by force.
The Program sounded in my mind one last time.
[Isabella, someone is trying to keep you in this world. You cannot fully leave yet.)
I wanted to ask who.
But I no longer had the strength.
When I opened my eyes again, I was standing beside the car.
And my body was still in Luca’s arms.
He had called Dante.
By the time Dante arrived, the sky had begun to pale. He got out of the car too fast, his coat half-buttoned, his face stripped of all
color.
For several seconds, he only stared.
Then he saw my hand hanging limp over Luca’s arm.
“No,” Dante said.
Luca looked up at him with eyes full of hatred.
“She was not safe in that place.”
Dante’s expression twisted. “I put her there to keep her alive.”
“You put her in a room where every breath was watched,” Luca said. “You called it protection because it made you feel less guilty.”
Dante stepped closer, then stopped as if the sight of me had cut the strength out of his legs.
“She was supposed to be watched.”
