Chapter 157: Adrian’s Regret

Chapter 157: Chapter 157: Adrian’s Regret

He remembered running. The slap of his shoes against the pavement came back first—sharp, relentless, the sound of desperation given form. Then the burn climbing up through his chest, a white-hot ache that refused to ease no matter how hard he pushed. Still he kept going. He had always kept going, even when every muscle screamed for him to stop, even when the world made it clear it had no use for someone like him.

Adrian had never been the strongest or the most talented. That truth sat in him like a stone he had carried since childhood. People had a way of looking past him, or through him, as if he occupied space only by accident. Coaches barked orders over his head. Teammates laughed without including him. Teachers marked his papers with the same tired indifference. The only person who ever studied alongside him regularly was Elena, and even she sometimes seemed to regard him with a quiet pity he pretended not to notice. But there had been one more person who mattered. His coach’s daughter.

She had been different from everyone else. Not louder, not brighter in the way that demanded attention, but steady in a way that felt like shelter. When Adrian struggled through training—lungs seizing, legs trembling, the familiar shame rising like bile—she was the one who told him to keep going. Her voice never rose. It simply reached him, calm and certain, cutting through the noise of his own self-doubt. When people mocked him for being too slow, too small, too ordinary, she told him not to listen. She said it as if the words belonged to him already, as if she were only reminding him of something he already knew but had forgotten how to believe. And despite the cancer eating away at her, she still laced up her shoes and ran beside him whenever she had the strength for it. He would watch her from the corner of his eye: the careful way she measured her breath, the moments she fell behind, the quiet determination with which she always came back. She never asked him to slow down. She never asked him to wait. She simply refused to let him run alone.

That day had been no different, until it was.

They had been jogging together along the familiar stretch of road that edged the town, the late afternoon light turning the pavement gold. Adrian, without quite meaning to, picked up his pace. Faster, then faster still. It felt good—the wind against his face, the rhythm of his stride, the rare, fleeting sense that he might finally be enough. He did not notice the space opening between them until it was already too wide. Somewhere along the way she was no longer beside him. He slowed and turned, expecting to see her catching her breath a few paces back, hand pressed to her side the way she sometimes did when the pain flared.

She wasn’t there.

His stomach dropped so hard it felt like falling. He turned in a full circle, scanning the empty road, the trees, the ditches. Panic rose sharp and immediate. Then he saw them: a group of men dragging her toward a truck parked half-hidden behind a stand of overgrown brush. Her sneakers scraped the ground. One of them had a hand over her mouth.

"Hey!" The word tore out of him before he had decided to speak. He was running before he’d even decided to move. The truck was already pulling away, tires kicking up dust, and he chased it until his lungs screamed, until the burn in his chest became something closer to fire. He refused to let it out of his sight. He followed the vehicle through the outskirts of town, past the last houses, past the point where the road turned rough and broken, all the way to an abandoned warehouse on the edge of everything.

What he found inside broke something in him that never fully healed.

She was on the ground. They were hitting her, kicking her, some of them trying to do worse. The sounds—the wet impact of fists, the sharp crack of a boot against bone, her muffled cries—lodged themselves in him like shrapnel. Adrian’s vision went red. Rage flooded every empty space inside him, drowning the lifelong certainty that he was weak, that he was small, that he could never be enough.

"Get away from her!" He threw himself at the nearest man. It was not skill. It was not strength. It was pure, reckless need. He had never been a fighter. He only had speed, and speed was not enough against several grown men, some of them armed. They surrounded him. Fists and boots found him again and again. He kept getting up anyway—again and again—because stopping meant leaving her alone with them. Blood filled his mouth. His vision swam. Still he rose, until one of them drew a gun and pointed it straight at his chest.

He froze.

The world narrowed to the black mouth of the barrel and the cold certainty that this was the end. He could not move. He could not breathe. All the years of being looked past, of being insufficient, of failing in quiet ways, seemed to crystallize in that single moment.

She moved before he could.

Despite her injuries, despite the sickness already draining her, she forced herself upright. She put her body between Adrian and the barrel. There was no hesitation in the motion—only the same quiet resolve she had always shown when she told him to keep going.

The gunshot filled the warehouse. ℴ

She fell. Adrian caught her before she hit the ground, his hands already slick with her blood. The heat of it shocked him. "No," he said, over and over, the word breaking apart in his throat. "No, no, no." The men who had done this fled into the night. He barely registered them leaving. The world had shrunk to the weight of her in his arms and the terrible stillness spreading through her body.

He held her while she struggled to breathe. Each shallow rise of her chest felt like a miracle he was already losing.

"Please," he begged, his voice cracking apart. "Please stay with me."

Her hand lifted, trembling, and touched his cheek. The touch was so light it almost wasn’t there. "It’s not your fault," she whispered.

"Don’t say that." The words came out raw. He could not bear them. If it was not his fault, then what was all this for? If it was not his fault, then why did the guilt already feel like it would never leave?

"It’s not." Her breathing hitched. A small, wet sound escaped her. "You can’t blame yourself."

Tears were already running down his face, hot and relentless. "You shouldn’t have done that."

She managed something close to a smile. It was the same smile she had given him on the hardest training days—soft, certain, refusing to let him sink. "I was going to die anyway."

"No." The denial was instinctive, desperate. He would not accept it. He could not.

"You have to live."

He held her tighter, as if the pressure of his arms might keep her there, might anchor her to the world a little longer. "I could have saved you."

"You did your best."

"I wasn’t strong enough." The confession tore out of him. It was the truth he had carried his whole life, the one no one else had ever needed to say because they could see it already. Here, in the dark of the warehouse, with her blood on his hands, it felt like the only truth that mattered.

Her hand slipped from his cheek. The absence of that small weight was worse than the gunshot. His whole body shook. Then he screamed until his throat gave out—screamed for her, for the years she would never have, for the quiet kindness that had been the only light in so many of his days. He blamed himself for every second of it, then and for a long time afterward. He blamed the moment he had sped up. He blamed every weakness that had left him unable to protect her. He blamed the fact that she had chosen him over herself when he had never been worth the choice.

When her body was returned to her father, Coach Daniel broke in a way Adrian had never seen a person break. The man who had always been steel and discipline crumpled. He never once said the words out loud. He never accused Adrian of anything. But Adrian could feel it behind his eyes anyway—grief so vast it left no room for anything else, pain that had nowhere to go, and somewhere underneath both, a thread of resentment he never tried to hide well enough. Adrian carried that look with him. He carried the silence. He carried the knowledge that the one person who had believed in him was gone, and the one person left who might have understood had looked at him as if he were the reason the light had gone out.

It stayed with Adrian long after that day. It stayed long after his own death, when the memory of the lightning that had struck him down still occasionally crossed his mind alongside a darker thought he never let himself finish. That maybe Coach Daniel had felt something like relief when Adrian died too. Maybe he had blamed him after all, in the end. Maybe the world was quieter without the boy who had failed to save her.

Adrian never found out. And now he never would.

---

The memory faded, and Theon’s steps slowed to a stop entirely. For a long moment he said nothing, only watched him with something that looked, for once, like understanding rather than curiosity. The usual sharp edge of interest was gone. In its place was a quieter recognition, the kind that comes from having carried a similar weight and knowing how heavy it remains.

"I can’t let what happened in the past to happen again," Theon said quietly, though the resolve underneath the words was absolute. "I won’t."