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For three months, Rome told himself silence was necessary – mercy, safety maybe.
It had to be. It was the only lie he had left.
No.
The only word he had been repeating to himself till the word lost shape, till they became less of a thought and more of a noose around his neck, or a gun pointed to his temple every time his hand unknowingly moved towards his phone.
For more than a decade, there had never been a stretch of distance between him and Mok that had truly been separation. There had always been an intel, an update, a report, a name, a shadow posted close in Mok’s orbit, a discreet confirmation folded into Rome’s daily intelligence briefings as naturally as territorial seizes, triad disputes, shipment movements, and the behavioral patterns of enemies who believed themselves too clever to escape Arseni’s eyes.
Little things – he ate, rested, trained till two in the morning, went on an assistantion mission, took a bullet for Thee and pretended it was a scratch.
Mundane. Useless. Necessary.
To outsiders, Mok was an asset, too important an asset to be left unaccounted for. He was the bodyguard, yes, but he was not merely a muscle or extra help. Rome kept tabs on the man who could dismantle a room with his hands and dismantle an empire with what he refused to say to safeguard the empire.
That was the practical explanation.
The truth was softer, and therefore more dangerous—that Rome would cross continents, sit in rooms with political leaders and powerful enemies, negotiate blood debts as though they were numbers on paper, and smile while promising death in a voice gentle enough to make powerful men lower their eyes.
Yet every morning, before sunlight reached his skin, he searched for one name first.
Mok.
Then Rome had convinced himself that he kept him safe - by cutting him out cleanly, by severing every line that could be followed, every thread that could be pulled by Rome’s enemies to trace love back to its weakest point and turn it into a weapon.
He had said the words he knew would wound deeply enough to leave no room for argument. He had looked into Mok’s eyes and lied with the precision of a man signing an execution order.
‘If I’d would it would come to this, I wouldn’t have fallen in love”
Mok stayed silent, not in shock but in understanding.
And that had been the cruelest part.
Mok had only looked with the same old, unwavering gaze Rome used to mistake for indifference before he learned it was devotion in its most disciplined form. There had been no anger. No accusation. No trembling demand to make Rome stay. And then, just with two words, spoken soft enough Rome almost missed it if it didn’t feel like a knife through his chest.
“I understand.”
Even now, three months later, in the private office on top of his empire, with a glamorous and exquisite city burning itself into the evening, Rome could still hear it.
I understand.
He had spent three months trying to build something large enough to drown out the echo of Mok’s voice.
Now sitting on his golden throne, his phone sat silent on the table in front of him, not because there were no messages, but because he had ordered every channel stripped clean. Mok’s name was removed from private monitoring essentials. Watchers were reassigned. No one was to follow him. No one was to report on him. No one was to keep the old line alive.
Rome ordered the halt himself, his voice did not shake, and that became the first lie he told after one he told Mok.
The empire welcomed him back like a beast recognizing its master – and that’s when he became brutally efficient – turning his grief into focus, his pain into power – because pain, unlike love, could be made useful if he broke it down into discipline.
In three months, his reign had tripled.
Families folded beneath him, enemies pledged allegiance as their throats laid beneath Rome’s blade, laundering networks bent their knees, arm deals absorbed and took over. His wealth doubled with no limit. His power tripled, not because he wanted more, but because power was the only language the underworld respected.
He told himself this was shield, protection — if Rome became untouchable, then no one would dare touch what had once belonged to him.
Silence had become another discipline, one he repeated every day until he almost believed it.
Rome had achieved many things out of the brutality, the cruelty and necessity of all. But there wasn’t a time he had learned how to stop listening for footsteps that never came.
Then, on the ninety-third day, his phone rang during a meeting with the corpse of a mole lying two feet away from his seat.
Rome remembered the exact moment later with a clarity so sharp it felt unnatural, as though his mind froze the frame and preserved it in glass. The sharp sound cut through the room. His eyes dropped to the screen.
Thee.
Something in his chest went quiet before he answered.
“P’Kian,” he said.
There was no greeting on the other end. No breath wasted on courtesy. Only a heavy warning dressed in silence.
“Mok’s down.”
The world did not stop. That was the obscene part.
People in the meeting still talked in low voices, movement signified by paper raffling, leather chairs creaking softly, city lights still buzzing in red and white veins, as if Rome’s life didn’t split open in two words.
He stood without looking at anyone who mattered. He didn’t even register how he got there but within the hour, Rome was in the air as he found himself sitting alone in the cabin with his phone in his hand. His knuckles whitened from the grip as they rested on his knees, his body still, face emptied of emotions that no one dared breathing in his direction.
Mok’s down. Not injured, missing, not dead.
Down.
The word brought a finality that Rome didn’t dare assess in entirety. It was the blunt vocabulary of people who had lived too long around violence to decorate it. He tried to ask himself what it meant, but every possibility – fights, gunshot, poison, ambush, kidnap, threat – almost brought him to his knees.
His mind, which had built empires from scattered facts, refused to function, because every thought now began with Mok and ended nowhere and Rome couldn’t breathe in that possibility.
By the time the jet landed, Rome had not moved, not even when he sat in the car to the hospital, until he reached the doors of the white building, he had torn through every version of prayer he did not believe in.
The hospital light was too bright, too white, too clean for the kind of blood that had built their lives.
Rome moved through it like a storm in human shape, people parting paths before they knew why as he rushed to the ICU entrance. Security lowered their eyes as they approached, someone greeted his name, someone tried to speak into their wireless. Thee was waiting at the ICU doors, face drawn so tight it looked carved rather than alive.
Rome did not greet him.
“Where is he?”
Thee didn’t speak. He simply turned and walked through the doors as Rome followed.
The ICU room was quiet in the way machines make quiet impossible.
There was a ventilator beside the bed ringing with a soft mechanical whine that filled the spaces where Mok’s breath should have filled. Monitors stood around him, hanging bags of fluids dripping steadily through tubes and needles that punctured into his pale arms. The heart monitor beeped with a sound that was both devastation and salvation at the same time.
Then Rome saw Mok – or a facade of what the love of his life was meant to be.
Mok was still.
For a moment, Rome could not understand what he was seeing.
Because there had always been something alive in him – a sigh, a frown, a brooding readiness beneath the skin, a contained violence, a watchfulness that made rooms rearrange themselves around his presence. Trained as the bodyguard since before he knew words, his body was never taught to rest – and he never truly did. Even when he was asleep, Mok looked like a man ready for war in a split second, like someone who could wake with a knife already in motion.
But the body on the bed did not move.
His face was pale beneath the bruised shadows of exhaustion. His lips were dry, his hair unkempt like it had been pushed back carelessly by people prioritising everything else but his tidiness. Bandages covered his throat and collarbone, bruises bloomed in dull color, varied intensity beneath places not covered by thin hospital gown.
There was no single wound that announced itself as the cause for his plight. No dramatic bullet hole, no fatal wound, no blood soaking through fabrics – no clear catastrophe enough to explain why Mok looked less than a wounded man than a ghost of what he used to be.
Rome stopped at the foot of the bed.
For one terrible second, some naive childish part of him waited for Mok to open his eyes and scold him for rushing back so rashly.
But there was no movement.
“What happened?” words left Rome’s mouth even before he even noticed he spoke.
Silence.
Rome turned his head slowly to face Thee and the doctor beside him properly before repeating.
“What happened?”
Rome glanced at the doctor now, a elder man of fifties, someone with seemingly steady hands and enough experience to remain calm beside families who might fall apart. Rome noticed something in his eyes when he looked at Mok – not sadness or pity, something closer to heartache – the kind that came with watching someone weather storms they had no business being in.
“He collapsed,” the doctor said.
Rome stared at him.
“From?”
Thee looked away.
Rome took one step closer. “Explain.”
The doctor glanced at Mok before continuing in a softer voice.
“There is no single injury responsible for his current condition. There have been no wounds detected, no bleeding, no toxin detected so far. No obvious acute event that would explain the extent of his particular systemic failure.”
The words entered Rome’s ears and rearranged themselves into something meaningful, something he could use to explain the sight in front of him. But nothing stood.
“Then what am I seeing?,” he said again, voice lower this time, which made the doctor stiffen.
The doctor took a breath. “His body appears to have suffered prolonged accumulative trauma. Layers of repeated injuries, many untreated before being inflicted again. Some wounds healed improperly. Some may have become infected before partially resolving. Signs of blood loss that occurred repeatedly over time, not all at once.There were prior fractures as well accompanied with structural tissue damage and tear.“
He paused as he allowed the words to sink in before continuing.
“Apart from the internal trauma, there was severe exhaustion, dehydration, malnutrition and neurological stress consistent with multiple concussive events.”
Rome looked back at the person in front of him. He didn’t blink.
“He didn’t collapse because of one event,” the doctor said quietly. “He collapsed because his body had nothing left.”
Rome couldn’t breathe. Because for the first time in his life, he didn't recognize the strongest man he knew.
“I have seen many patients,” the doctor continued, voice lower now, as though he no longer knew how to make the truth less traumatic. “Treated soldiers, mercenaries, gang members, men pulled from collapsed buildings, men who survived torture, men who should not have been alive when they come to me,”
His gaze moved briefly to Rome and back to Mok.
“But I have never seen someone continue functioning this long carrying this much untreated trauma.”
Something inside Rome gave way, but nothing came out.
No sobs, no tears, not even a sound.
Only stillness - cold, unmoving stillness that seemed to empty his bones.
He turned to Thee. “Where was he?”
Thee’s jaw tightened.
Rome didn’t need the reply to know the answer.
“I don’t know.”
The sentence landed harder than it should have.
Rome looked at him properly then. Thee, his elder brother, the first born of Arseni, Mok’s boss. Thee, who knew every movement of his own people and kept everyone who mattered close. Thee, who could find a traitor in twelve hours and a missing dollar in six.
“You don’t know,” Rome repeated - not out of anger, out of disbelief.
“No.”
“For three months?”
Something in Thee broke inward.
“No.”
Rome’s gaze sharpened.
As if he lost the only connection to the truth, Rome began asking questions.
Not like a lover, like an heir, like a man trained to turn fear into interrogation before fear could turn him useless.
Who last saw him? Where did he go? When did he leave? What accounts moved? Which doctors treated him? Who filed reports? Who authorized operations? Who signed off on weapons? Who knew?
The answers came back one by one, each emptier than the last.
No one knew, because no one had ordered him out, no one had tracked him. Every trail started with fragments and ended in shadows, rumors, dead ends. There was nothing complete, not even crumbs substantial enough for Rome to feed on. Mok had moved through the deeds as though he had cut himself out of every system designed to keep men like him alive – a ghost.
Mok had become one for three months. And Rome, who had once known the minute Mok left a room, had known nothing.
The only thing they had recovered from him was his phone.
It had been in Mok’s jacket when he collapsed at the foot of the Arseni mansion staircase, face-down on marble, one hand still curled as though he had been reaching for the railing. There had been no blood pooling beneath him, no knife in his back, no enemy standing over him.
Mok had walked in alone, through the front doors, three steps past the threshold, before his body had given up.
Rome took the phone from Thee without a word, feeling its weight heavier than it should have been.
The screen was cracked at one corner, dried dirt caught in the sides, and a smear of something dark beneath the edge of the screen that Rome chose not to know.
The battery was nearly dead. The lock screen was black. No wallpaper. No photograph. No sentiment.
Rome’s thumb hovered over the keypad and for a split second, he hesitated. He should not have known the password.
But he did.
[1206]
He laughed – loud, and ugly. The sound was cold, empty, ripped of humor, charged with mockery. It was his birthday.
The phone unlocked.
Of course Mok had never changed it. Not after Rome told him he regretted him, not after Rome shut him out, not after three months of silence, blood, and whatever hellfire burnt him thorough enough to leave him unmoving beneath these white lights.
Rome’s birthday still opened the last private thing Mok owned – as if there wasn’t a part of him that he didn’t offer willingly to Rome. Even after Rome had spent three months convincing himself he no longer belonged there.
The first folder was named simply:
R
Rome stared at it longer than necessary, like he needed moments before any possibility of finding out what Mok had been through.
He tapped on it and saw terrifyingly organized files of maps, locations, names, photographs, voice notes, medical reports. Then like a strike to his chest, it dawned on him – these are targets – organized by territory, power, status, proximity and threat level. It was meticulous, clinical, brutal in its clarity if you may.
This wasn’t a collection of information, it was a road map, a blueprint, Mok’s mind laid bare in pixels and texts.
Rome opened the first report.
Date. Location. Target. Status - Eliminated - 12th Feb.
He opened another.
Date. Location. Target. Status - Eliminated - 20th Feb.
Another.
Date. Location. Target. Status - Eliminated - 10th Mar.
The details repeated itself with the devotion of prayer and the coldness of an autopsy.
There were no other details attached to each report – no emotions, no explanation, no mention of the aftermath – just outcomes. Only outcomes. Only Rome.
Rome lowered himself into the chair beside the bed because his legs couldn’t withstand the weight of this knowledge. The screen blurred, he blinked, then cleared. He kept reading.
At first, his mind tried to resist everything it came across.
This couldn’t be. He thought.
Not because he doubted what he saw, but because Rome had been trained to distrust obvious patterns, especially when those that were too unbearable to be true. Perhaps Mok was under orders, perhaps he didn’t put himself in all of these situations, perhaps Mok had not done all of it himself. Perhaps –
Then Rome found the photographs. And it felt like he was suffocating in open air.
A burnt warehouse; corpses laid across the field, a ledger open on a metal table, a sniper dead with his rifle in hand – then, the photo of Mok’s own forearm, split open from wrist to elbow, stitched badly by someone who didn’t have time or didn’t care to.
Rome stopped breathing.
He enlarged the image at the raw, angry, poorly closed wound, then found the chat log with a doctor Mok knew and trusted..
[Got it fixed.]
[Still functional]
[Just send the pain jabs]
Rome’s fingers tightened around the phone until the cracked screen bit into his skin.
His finger trembled as he scrolled to the earlier messages with the doctor.
A photo of his ribs with furious red and purple bruising, blood stains across Mok’s torso.
[No time for imaging]
[Send meds]
Then another – a photo of Mok’s left thigh with a deep laceration, with a hint of his bones visible under the gruesome red and yellow fluids of his flesh.
[I’ll fix this. Heading back in 2 hours.]
[Send meds]
Then another – blood dripping from his temple with a gushing wound along the hairline.
[Got hit on the head. Blurred vision with nausea.]
[Still functional]
[Send meds]
The hospital room seemed to press in around Rome.
The machines kept breathing. Mok remained still.
Rome read until the photos stopped being photos and became a map of a body being emptied, week by week, mission by mission.
Different territories. Different names. Different threats.
Same ending.
Date. Location. Target. Status - Eliminated - XXth XXX.
Every status updated was a threat gone.
A rival triad in Singapore attempting to capture Mok as leverage against Rome. Gone.
A rogue staff in Hong Kong who had sold old Arseni safehouse details to the enemy Gone.
A contracted assassin coordinated through three layers of contact points. Gone before Rome ever knew the contract existed.
Hundreds of bodies laid behind Mok’s path – not by wrath, and that was what made it so much worse. Because wrath had emotions and ego, because it would burn fierce enough for the world to see the flames and know who had set the fire.
But this was protection – the kind that was stripped of reservations, of restraints, of tenderness until only violence remained.
He didn't do it because Rome left.
He did it because Rome still existed.
He forced himself to continue, mission after mission, blood after blood, scrolling through pictures and reports like a system.
Until his attention paused at a photo album – untitled.
Rome stared at it longer than necessary because it looked out of place. Everything else had a label, a name, a date, a status, but this had nothing and somehow, it frightened him a little more - not because of the unknown, but because of how vulnerable it seemed.
He tapped in only to endless photos of him - a blurry picture of him asleep in the car, a picture of him leading the negotiation with another family head, him drinking coffee at the house balcony, him reading, him laughing at something with his eyes closed.
His vision blurred again. None of them posed, none of them taken with a purpose. Just because Mok wanted moments of Rome captured and safekept. Rome couldn't remember posing for a single one.
Mok had simply spent years looking at him when Rome wasn't looking back.
Then…the last photo.
A back view of a black sedan, taken from behind at a far distance. The day of the breakup where Rome left.
The final picture Mok ever took was Rome.
Rome had to force himself upright.
He closed the album, allowing his reflection to stare back at him from the black screen. He almost stopped there – should have stopped there. But he opened the next folder anyway. Continued scrolling through endless records.
The next find was a gap – two weeks. No reports, no locations, no chat logs, nothing. For fourteen days, Mok vanished even from his own records.
Rome scrolled aggressively through the folders, fast, then slow, then fast again, searching for a photo, a hidden file, a message, anything to fill the silence. His pulse climbed at this unknown.
And finally, on the fifteenth day, there was a voice file sent from Mok to the doctor. Rome pressed play also without thinking.
It started with just static at first, then breathing – labored breathing – rough, shallow, wet at the edges.
Rome’s hand went numb around the phone.
[Escaped.]
Rome held his breath at the single word.
[Captured. Fourteen days. Location Unknown. The Lee’s. They were planning an ambush on him in Hong Kong’s safe house up the east. ]
His voice cut out. Returned.
[Left shoulder dislocated, reset. Right middle and ring fingers broken. Sharp pain on left abdomen, possible internal bleeding. 104 degrees. Lingering fever.]
Rome closed his eyes.
[Can’t type. Send more meds. There’s another mission three days later.]
There was silence after that, long enough that Rome thought the file had ended.
Then Mok’s voice returned, softer.
[Rome’s safe]
The phone slipped from Rome’s hand as it hit the floor with a sound so small it should not have mattered. Rome stared at it like poison and his body refused to pick it up again. His hand moved but stopped halfway as his fingers shook so violently they no longer looked like his own.
He looked at Mok instead, at the stillness of him, at the tubes, at the bruising, at the unscarred parts visible above the blanket that now seemed less like skin and more like evidence not yet properly examined.
Fourteen days. Mok had been held captive for fourteen days – beaten, wounded, starved, tortured, kept alone in a place Rome could not see, could not reach, could not burn down because no one had told him it existed. And then after the near-miss with death, after dragging himself out of hell by his own teeth, Mok had rested for three days.
Three.
Rome knew because the next report was dated seventy-two hours later.
Date. Location. Target. Status - Eliminated - 7th Apr.
Something in Rome’s mind simply stopped, not broke, stopped, like someone pulled the plug on his existence.
There was no dramatic collapse, not from the heir of the Arseni family. There was nothing left in him to weep, to rage, to demand for blood. Because blood had already been spilled from the body of his love, clinically and procedurally operated across three months in steps so consistent and cruel that there was no single enemy was enough to receive the terror Rome wanted to serve.
He simply stood in the knowledge as he sat beside Mok’s bed and became very quiet.
He didn’t speak, eat, drink, move or sleep as he listened to the sound of the machines echoing as loud as his heart beat. Nurses changed shifts, daylight disappeared, morning returned. But Rome never noticed. All he could see was his own reflection on the glass windows looking like a mourner too proud to bow his head.
At some point, Thee tried to persuade him.
“Rome.”
Nothing.
“You need to rest.”
Still nothing. Rome’s eyes stayed fixed on Mok, as if Mok would disappear if he looked away.
Thee exhaled.
“He wouldn’t want this.”
For the first time in hours, a voice, cracked and thin came.
“You don’t know what he wanted.”
Thee said nothing.
Rome looked down at the phone lying on the side table again.
Because he knew now, what Mok wanted – Mok had wanted Rome safe. Not back with him, not forgiven, not happy even, just safe.
Night deepened around the hospital, softer, more merciless. The daytime crowds dissipated, leaving only machines, dimmed lights, rare footsteps and restless shuffles of wounded persons on their beds. Rome stood still beside Mok as he watched the rise and fall of the ventilator-assisted breaths and the pulse line on the heart monitor like a devoted worshipper.
And when his eyes dropped to Mok’s hands resting motionlessly on the white sheets, that was when he noticed the scar.
It ran across Mok’s hand in a jagged line, pale at the edges but still raised, cutting from the base of his thumb toward the center of his palm. It wasn’t clean, not surgical, not old enough to have faded properly. The kind of scar made by something harsh, hurried and violent.
Rome stared at it.
Not because scars were unfamiliar to them but because he knew Mok’s hands.
The thought came so suddenly, so sharply, that his knees nearly collapsed.
He knew those hands better than he knew most faces. Knew the callus along the trigger finger, knew the old scar near his eyebrow from a fight eight years ago, knew the cut near his wrist he got from protecting Thee in knife fight. He knew the way those hands could break a man’s wrist without effort and then, hours later, button Rome’s shirt with a care so quiet it felt like reverence.
He did not know this scar.
Rome reached out, letting his fingers hovered above Mok’s hand for long moments before touching his skin, as though pain could still be awakened by tenderness. When his thumb finally traced the line, the skin beneath was warm, alive. That should have comforted him, but it did not. Because the warmth only made the stillness more absurd, more unbearable.
His fingers traced the scar to Mok’s wrist.
Another mark – a burn, circular and darkened at the center.
Rome’s breath caught.
He pushed the hospital sleeve back with trembling fingers.
Then he let his eyes roam across the lines of Mok’s fingers, wrists, elbows, forearms – letting the scars reveal themselves like pages of a horror book. Once smooth pale skin now covered with a thin white line in old yellow and purple shadows, a puncture mark near the crook of the arm not medically justifiable.
And now that he saw the scars on the skin like testimonies, he now saw every piece of Mok’s body like a catalog of suffering – a crooked set of one finger, the faint swelling at the shoulders – one injury, then another and then another.
Rome forced himself to stop looking when he suddenly understood with a clarity more devastating than any photo or report or chat logs could have given him.
There was not an inch of Mok that had not paid for him.
The missions had not been fables. The words were not reports – every single thing from wounds, fractures, burns, concussion, blood loss, pain – they were all evident on this body, on Mok.
On this hand that had once held Rome’s hand beneath a table during a negotiation because Rome had been bleeding through his shirt and refusing to leave.
On this shoulder that Rome had leaned on many nights when exhaustion overwhelmed him.
On this arm that had crossed in front of Rome so many times that protection had been engineered into Mok’s instinct.
Rome’s throat tightened as he shut his eyes.
For one second, he was back in that room three months ago, saying the lie and watching Mok accept it even when he knew it wasn’t true, believing pain could be controlled and safe if Rome caused it deliberately enough.
I would have never fallen in love.
Mok had understood, he always did whenever it came to Rome.
Mok had understood and then walked away to love him anyway, without permission, without witness, without reward.
Rome’s knees hit the floor with a crack that splintered the silence of the room.
There was no grace in it, no dignity left from the heir of the Arseni family. The same man feared across continents, whose name made rooms quiet and powerful men reconsider their stances, fell beside a hospital bed like something shot clean through the heart
Only broken breaths followed after his collapse.
His hand closed around Mok’s, slow and measured, like he had to be careful – of the IV, the bruises, the bandages – even if it was after all the harm had already been done.
“I’m sorry,” words came through more like a breath than his voice – thin, useless, shockingly human.
He pressed his forehead to Mok’s hand.
“I’m sorry.”
His shoulders began to shake.
“I’m sorry.”
Chanting the apology like a remedy for Mok’s recovery.
The first tear rolled down without permission. And once it did, there was no stopping the rest. Rome cried the way men like him were never supposed to cry, not beautifully, not quietly, not with the restraint of someone aware of being watched.
He broke, wide and open, folded over Mok’s hand and sobbed until the sound tore through his chest like something being dragged out by force. His voice turned ragged, every apology dragging through his throat like broken glass.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and again, and again, because every other word had abandoned him.
He was sorry for the lie.
Sorry for the silence.
Sorry for every decision made to erase the last line between them, for thinking distance could save a man whose love had never needed permission to cross it, for building an empire large enough to threaten the world while Mok was somewhere bleeding alone on the concrete
Sorry for every wound he had not known to bandage, for every night Mok had burned himself to extinguish every fire that could possibly reached Rome in some imagined future only Mok could see clearly enough to destroy.
“I left you alone,” Rome choked out.
Only the machines answered.
“I left you alone in this and I wasn’t there.”
His grip tightened, then loosened instantly when he remembered Mok’s injuries.
“You kept every promise,” Rome whispered, voice breaking so badly the words barely survived. “Every promise you ever made to me.”
He lifted his head just enough to look at Mok’s face.
Motionless, pale, still beautiful in the most cruel way.
“I broke mine.”
The machines breathed.
But Mok did not wake.
Rome lowered his forehead back to Mok’s hand and wept until the night stretched thin around them, until the hospital room held nothing but the sound of machines keeping Mok alive and Rome’s apologies arriving too late to be answered.
Outside, the world remained intact.
The Arseni empire stood stronger each day, Rome’s enemies were dead, territories secured, wealth and power growing. No one could threaten Rome’s state or even touch his reign.
But yet, on the hospital bed before him, the man he had tried so desperately to keep safe., lay motionless beneath white sheets after having spent every breath, every scar, every drop of blood to make everything happen.
Rome had wanted to keep Mok safe.
Mok had made Rome safe instead.
Neither of them had managed to save the other.