You're not the only one with scars.

"Oh, shoot."

Startled from her thoughts about pancakes and an uncertain future, Calla glanced up from the filing cabinet in the mortuary's upstairs office, which she'd only just started to reorganize. The Director sometimes had her try to tackle the mess that had accumulated over the years. A losing battle.

He looked over at her now from behind his reading spectacles. Not reading glasses, he would always tell her. Spectacles. As if the distinction was somehow important. "Would you mind grabbing some of that window cleaner down in the basement?" He returned his attention back to his computer. "Oh!" Wide eyes flying back to her face. "And a couple spare rolls of paper towels, if you can. We're running low in the kitchen."

Calla had no idea how either of those things merited an oh, shoot—but she abandoned the cabinet anyway, relieved to be free of the tedious work. "Sure. "I'll be right back."

"Try not to fall down the stairs," he called after her.

"That was one time," she called back, his chuckle following her down the hall.

Still, she minded her step as she descended the stairs and slipped into the examination room, shuddering at the frigid temperature. The Director liked to keep this particular room at a steady thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Not thirty-six. Not thirty-eight.

Thirty-seven.

She rapped her knuckles along the storage containers in the far wall—dead body cribs, the Director liked to call them, much to her amusement—as she passed them by on her way to the basement door.

Admittedly, basement was a stretch. Shutting the door firmly behind her so that the cold couldn't escape, she used her phone's flashlight to guide her way down a set of rickety wooden steps that led down into a shallow crawl space stuffed with all manner of crap—cardboard boxes and dusty old books and even a discarded coffin, which somehow always managed to give her the creeps.

An admirable feat.

Calla pillaged the items the Director requested from the off-white cabinet by the stairs, grimacing at the dust that accumulated on her fingers. Grumbling about the blasted dark and dust and why the hell does this building have a basement, anyway, she tucked the Windex under her arm and, paper towels balanced in hand, carefully ascended the steps in semi-darkness. 

Try not to fall down the stairs, she told herself dryly, nudging open the basement door with her hip.

Returning to the office with her bounty, the Director smiled, triumphant as she deposited the items on the edge of his desk. "Thank you." He immediately reached for the Windex and turned to glare at the stubborn spot on the window that had been there for at least as long as Calla had held the job. "It's about time I cleaned this place up."

Calla eyed the cluttered shelves and the hopelessly mismatched files jutting out of the nearby cabinet. Cleaning this place up would require more than a single bottle of Windex, she wagered, plucking a file out of the cabinet's top drawer, curious. 

Tax returns. She returned the file with a grimace and selected another one at random.

"Oh. I almost forgot." The Director's tone remained neutral, his shrewd gaze fixated on the stubborn spot on the window—but there was a curious undercurrent to the words that made her look over at him. "A man dropped by earlier. Said he was a friend of your mother's."

Calla froze, the manilla folder poised between her hands. "A man?" she asked evenly.

Alarm bells ring-ring-ringing in her head.

"Yes. His name was...oh, shoot." He frowned. "Reginald something-or-other. Michaels?"

"Gerald Michaels," Calla corrected automatically. Her fingers had gone numb, her face cold and stiff as she blood drained from it.

He snapped his fingers. "That's it. That's the one." He resumed his incessant scrubbing at the window.

"Oh." Calla's stomach twisted. She wondered if she was about to be sick. "When was this?"

"Few minutes before you arrived." He shot her an apologetic smile. "This old mind isn't what it used to be, I'm afraid."

"No worries," she croaked, blank with panic. 

Michaels had come looking for her. Here, at work. But she'd been late—she was never late—which meant the next obvious place he would go looking would be—

The apartment. Cooper.

Calla tried to match the file in her hands to its alphabetical slot, but—oh, it was no use. Fuck the filing cabinet. Fuck the job.

She shoved the file back into the drawer at random. "Mr. Richards—"

He spritzed the window with another round of cleaner, the bottle whinging and whining as he did so. "It's a slow day. You go on ahead and catch up with your friend."

Friend. Michaels, her friend.

Calla almost laughed.

I will kill him. "Thanks, Mr. Richards." I will grind his bones to dust. "See you Wednesday." I will bury him alive—

"See you then," he called as she grabbed her things and walked from the room. Calm. She could be calm. Cool. Collected.

The second her sneakers hit the sidewalk, she broke into a dead sprint.

Damn it. Damn her and her damn good mood. She'd insisted on leaving the truck behind this morning—it's a beautiful day, she'd argued when Cooper had tried to pass off the keys. I'll walk. It's only fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes for Cooper to bleed out on her apartment floor, if Michaels had made it that far. A thousand horrific scenarios played out in her head. 

Cooper, dead. Cooper, kidnapped. Cooper, screaming as Michaels carved a new scar into his skin to match the one his son had left behind.

You're not the only one with scars.

Calla bolted down the sidewalk. Dodging passerby and cars, their blaring horns following her as she darted across the street, heedless of the walk signs.

Her lungs burned.

Faster.

Muscles screaming.

Fasterfasterfaster—

Fifteen minutes from the mortuary to her apartment. But she made it in eight.

Not fast enough. She'd grown slow since her track days. Too slow. Dangerously slow. She cursed herself for that weakness as she raced up her apartment building's stairwell, forgoing the elevator entirely. She couldn't stop thinking about what she would find once she got to the apartment.

Cooper, gone. Or worse.

She couldn't fathom it. Couldn't imagine a world without him in it.

Calla's breath caught as she opened the apartment door. Unlocked. Why was it unlocked—

The instant she stepped through the door, she saw him. Cooper, facedown on the living room floor.

No. No. No.

Calla stood frozen in the doorway. The cold did not register. Nor the fire in her lungs. Nor the tremor in her legs. 

Cooper.

One step forward. Another. Until she'd dropped to her knees beside him, only dimly aware of the strange, high-pitched ringing in her head. 

She'd forgotten what she was supposed to do.

A pulse. Of course. She had to check for a pulse.

Swallowing back bile, Calla leaned in close and pressed her fingers against his jugular, feeling for—

Cooper's pulse thrummed, thready and weak, beneath her fingers. 

Alive. He was alive.

Relief crashed through her. No. Not relief. There was no word for this feeling, she realized. It was bone deep. Beyond words. Beyond reckoning.

For once, the empty spaces inside her were not quite so empty.

"I hate you," she whispered, and she meant it—because look what he'd done to her. 

Trembling with exhaustion, Calla rolled Cooper onto his back, grunting from the effort. Fearful he might be more broken than he seemed, she immediately checked him for injuries, running her fingers across his scalp and along the back of his neck, down his arms and across his abdomen and finally, over the planes of his chest, quietly savoring the rise and fall of his every breath. But there were no visible marks that she could see, or otherwise feel. No cuts. No bruises. No lumps or bumps of any kind.

"What happened to you?" she whispered. Now that her initial panic had faded into the background, she could think more objectively about the situation. And one detail, more than the others, demanded her attention.

The apartment had been unlocked.

Confident that Cooper wasn't in any immediate danger, Calla slowly pushed herself to her feet, scanning the apartment with newfound suspicion. Michaels could still be here, lurking around the corner. Perhaps Cooper had been bait. Very effective bait. Calla had been able to think of nothing else since walking through that door.

But that didn't feel right. If Michaels had wanted her, he could have taken her already.

Wary, Calla tiptoed over to her bedroom. Empty. So far as she could tell, anyway.

Feeling like a fool, she dropped to her knees and peered beneath the bed, as if looking for a monster. Which, technically...she was.

But there were no monsters under the bed. Only a shoebox by the headboard. Calla eyed the box and retrieved it on a whim. Luck, for once, had been on her side. Her secret store of cash had been left untouched. Silently, she replaced the lid and shoved the box back under the bed.

That was one crisis averted.

The next: her bathroom. Or more accurately, the flashdrive she kept stashed inside her bathroom, crammed in a tampon box under the sink. But that too had been left untouched. Calla let loose a sigh of relief.

"What the hell kind of message are you trying to send, Michaels?" she wondered aloud, backtracking to the living room. Cooper was still passed out on the floor, snoring softly.

Not yet willing to let her guard down, Calla checked the kitchen next. Also empty. 

Then she saw the picture on the fridge.

Calla never left pictures on the fridge. Michaels had sent her a message, after all.

Scowling, she stepped closer, analyzing the photo with a critical eye. It had been taken recently, she realized. She, Cooper, Olivia and Kevin were grinning at the camera, dressed in their ridiculous sweaters from the tacky Christmas party. 

A normal photo. Except for the fact that each of their faces had been marked out with a red X.

Rage simmered just beneath the surface of her skin. Calla ripped the picture from the fridge and flipped it over. On the back, also scrawled in red ink, was a message.

THE PROFESSOR DIES, OR HE DOES.

# # #

Every moment Cooper remained unconscious was a moment spent in agony.

Calla had never known anything could be so...miserable. But that was how she felt, sitting there on the floor with Cooper's head in her lap. Waiting and hoping and bargaining with the universe that he might wake up and end her suffering.

Please let him wake up.

She'd contemplated calling an ambulance a dozen times now, but—how to explain? So she'd moved on to other matters: how to get him off the floor. Calla had never considered herself weak, not by any definition—but dead weight was dead weight. Best case scenario, she'd end up dragging his ass across the rug, which would probably be uncomfortable, if not downright painful for both of them, and Calla didn't want to hear any whining about rug burn when he did finally deign to wake the hell up—

If he woke up.

Calla shuddered at the alternative, and just as her panic had wilted into relief upon finding him alive, her relief now curdled to anxiety as she contemplated the very real possibility that he would not remain that way for long.

And so she waited, every second an hour, every hour a year, every year an eternity.

Beneath her, Cooper began to stir.

Calla's breath caught as he shifted, sluggish from whatever stupor he'd been forced into. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to...

Cry? She contemplated the possibility and ultimately discarded the notion as ridiculous.

He mumbled something. Her name perhaps, and solace flooded through her, alarming in its intensity. She wondered how she might have reacted had he not woken, but—the idea repulsed her.

She wanted him with her. Always.

Do my wants outweigh his needs? she wondered, cupping his face between her palms. "Cooper," she murmured. He groaned low in his throat. "Cooper."

Frustrated that he would not open his eyes, she lightly tapped her fingers against his cheek. "Wake up."

"No," she thought he murmured.

She smacked his cheek with more force.

"Ow," he complained, and she nearly laughed as he cracked one eye open. "Can't you be gentle with me?"

"No."

He blinked rapidly, squinting up at her as he came fully back to consciousness. "Where—" He tried to sit upright then, but she held him down. "Where are we?"

"The apartment," she said, confused. "Where did you think we were?"

"Well, I don't know. I got knocked out trying to—" He stumbled over his words as her eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. "Um...leave?"

Calla could not decide if she was overjoyed he was awake—or if she was immensely annoyed that he was such a brainless moron. "And why did you try to leave the apartment?"

"I..." His blush deepened. "No reason."

"Liar."

"Aren't you so proud?"

"Cooper."

He reached up to rub his temple. "Ow," he repeated, grimacing.

"Playing the victim card, I see," she grumbled, but pressed her fingertips to his scalp nonetheless. His wince deepened. "What happened? What did Michaels do to you? And why did he leave you here—"

"Michaels?" Cooper seemed genuinely confused.

And that confused her. "Yes. Michaels. The Director told me he'd stopped by the mortuary again, looking for me."

Cooper tried to shake his head. Clearly, the movement did him no favors, because he blanched. "Not Michaels," he muttered. "It was Kevin. I saw him." His words had become somewhat disjointed. "Saw him...right before I blacked out..." 

Aghast, Calla could only stare down at him. 

Kevin Richards. Kind Kevin. Kevin with the blue hair and the wild grin.

I think I'm making the same mistakes all over again.

"What..." But Calla had been rendered speechless.

Cooper closed his eyes with a heavy sigh. "Yeah. He put some...towel over my face, or something. Made me slee-ee-ee-py," Cooper slurred, obviously still exhausted from the ordeal. He settled more comfortably against her lap. "It was strange, though."

"Strange...how?" she asked, voice strangled.

It took Cooper several seconds to answer her. "Like, he apologized. Right before everything went dark. It looked like he'd been crying. Other than that..." He tried to shrug, but it came across as more of a flinch. "I don't remember a thing."

Strange indeed. Calla thought of the picture on the fridge. Their faces, marked out in red ink. Including Kevin's.

"You look mad," Cooper whispered, his eyes still firmly closed.

"You're not even looking at me right now."

"You sound mad."

She brushed her fingers through his hair. "You scared me," she snapped. Loathing such an admission.

One of his eyes cracked open. "M'sorry," he mumbled.

"Bastard," she muttered, brushing a kiss to his forehead. "I hate you."

"Mmm." He smiled and closed his eye once more, cupping his hands over hers. "I love you."

Calla gazed down at him in shock. "What did you just say?"

Cooper's breaths had turned slow and even, and Calla realized, chagrined, that he'd fallen back asleep.

Bastard, she thought. Even if she couldn't help the warmth that bloomed in her chest.

Cooper loved her. Despite the empty spaces. Despite the blood on her hands.

Despite the fact that she would never be able to care for him the way he deserved.

Or maybe it's just the drugs talking, she reasoned with herself. He's obviously still completely out of it. He probably didn't mean a word of it.

Still. Something about his declaration tickled a spot in her brain. An old memory.

A fairytale not soon forgotten.

My love for her is so great, that if all the leaves on the trees were tongues, they would not be able to express it.

Idly, she traced the outline of his lips. His eyes. Ran her index finger along the curve of his nose and jaw.

I will risk my life to win her.

She frowned. What if it wasn't just the drugs screwing with his brain? What if he'd meant it?

What if Cooper Daniels loved her?

How cruel that would be. People who loved her did not often have a happy ending. If he'd meant what he said...

She feared his story would end much the same.

She trapped his scarred hand between hers and brushed a kiss to his knuckles. Perhaps he did love her. 

He loved her—and it would be his undoing.