Chapter 15: The Awakening Horror
The silence after her words wasn’t quiet. It was a vacuum, sucking all the air, all the early morning light, right out of the room. The only sound was the relentless, polite beep of the heart monitor, a cheerful counterpoint to the devastation on Cynna’s face.
Pedro didn’t move. He couldn’t. Her grip on his wrist was a cold, bony shackle.
“Cynna,” he finally managed, his voice a cracked whisper. It was the only word he had.
Her eyes, wide and glassy, searched his. She wasn’t seeing him, not really. She was seeing the past. “The tea. It was always the tea. She’d make it sweet, tell me it was for the stress.” A shudder ripped through her, violent and involuntary. “But that last time… the pills. It had to be- she somehow got in the apartment when I was sleeping or something. She poisoned me because of my not letting her have her way.”
They both recalled Maya’s desperation for the baby. Her possessive joy. Her strange, joy in being pregnant with Pedro’s child- though everyone found out she lost the child through spontaneous termination. Maya had lost herself in the madness- making Cynna the villain because she was rational on why it wasn’t a great idea for Pedro to be the donor.
Pedro’s breath left him in a slow, defeated sigh. He finally pried her fingers from his wrist, not to escape, but to hold both of her cold hands in his. He had to look at her. “It wasn’t the tea. Or pills you took yourself.”
Cynna stared, uncomprehending.
“It was an injection.” His voice was flat, a dull knife of a truth. “The toxicology report came back while you were under. They found a concentrated dose of insulin in your system. Leo found the used syringe tucked behind the kettle in your kitchen.”
The fairy lights. The cozy apartment. The scent of coffee. It all curdled in her memory, every mundane detail now a potential hiding place for a weapon. She tried to speak, but only a dry click came out.
“She must have done it while you were sleeping on the couch,” he continued, the words coming faster now, as if he needed to expel them. “Leo had just left to get groceries. It was a ten-minute window.”
A hysterical sound, half-laugh, half-sob, caught in her throat. “Because I said no? Because I told you it was a messy idea to be her donor?
That’s all?”
“It was never just that,” Pedro said, his thumb tracing circles on her knuckles. “You were the only one who said no to her. To the whole… fantasy. That made you the only real obstacle.”
He watched the understanding settle, cold and final. Her gaze drifted to the window, where the dawn was finally bleeding proper color into the sky. It felt like a violation, that beauty.
“The shared ER room,” she whispered, a new fragment clicking into that horrible mosaic. “When they brought me in. I heard screaming.”
Pedro nodded, his jaw tight. “They were there. Leo, and the neighbors from 4B. They all saw.” He let out a slow breath, the memory raw. “Leo was holding the syringe in a Ziploc, yelling for the cops. Maya was on a gurney across the aisle, getting checked for shock.”
The scene unfolded in Cynna’s mind, sharp and garish under the fluorescent ER lights. “What did she do?”
“She started begging. Not to me, but to everyone.” Pedro’s voice became a flat, clinical recital. “She was saying she just wanted to talk to you, that she’d never hurt her family, that you’d misunderstood. Then she saw the cops walking in and just… shattered.”
He paused, choosing words with terrible care. “She tried to get off the gurney. They had to hold her down. She was screaming your name, Cyn. Not in anger. It was this desperate, childlike wail. ‘Please tell Cynna I’m sorry, please tell her I didn’t mean it.’ Over and over. The whole waiting room heard. It’s all in the police report.”
A bitter taste filled Cynna’s mouth. The performance of grief, even then. The need to control the narrative. “So they all know.”
“Everyone in that room knew a woman had tried to kill her best friend,” Pedro confirmed, his voice gaining a hard edge. “The theatrics just proved the guilt. The detective said it was the most damning confession he’d ever witnessed.”
Silence stretched, filled only by the hum of the IV pump. Cynna felt unmoored, untethered from her own life. The person who’d picked out her wedding dress had also calculated the lethal dose.
“Where is she now?” The question felt necessary, a pin to mark the map of this new, horrifying landscape.
“Psych hold. Seventy-two hours, mandatory. After that, jail. The DA has the syringe, the witnesses, the tox report.” Pedro leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, the weight of it bowing his frame. “They’ll charge her with attempted murder. Leo is giving his statement again at nine.”
Cynna absorbed this. The justice of it felt abstract, miles away from the weakness in her limbs. “You visited her. In the psych hold.”
It wasn’t an accusation. Just a fact, hanging in the antiseptic air.
Pedro didn’t flinch. “I did. Last night. I had to see her face.”
“Why?”
“To know if it was really in there,” he said, his eyes finally meeting hers, brimming with a profound exhaustion. “The person who could do this. I’d only ever seen my friend. I needed to see the stranger.”
“And?”
“She’s empty, Cyn. Just… a shell. Crying, talking about the baby she lost, about how we were all supposed to be a family.” He shook his head, a short, sharp movement. “She doesn’t even seem to remember what she did to you. Or she’s chosen not to. It doesn’t matter. The person we knew is gone.”
Cynna looked down at her own hands, pale against the stiff hospital blanket. She thought of the shared dreams on the worn-out couch, the plans woven between cups of coffee. All of it was ash now.
“I need to see the file,” she said, her voice surprising her with its own rough certainty. “The police file. All of it.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I do.” She shifted, wincing at the pull of tubes. “I need to see the facts. The witness statements from the ER, the evidence log. I need to see the story without… without her in the room telling it.”
Pedro studied her for a long moment, seeing the resolve hardening behind the fatigue. He gave one slow, conceding nod. “I’ll call the detective. He’ll bring it.”
“Good.” She let her head fall back against the pillow, spent but clear. The path forward was paved with terrible pages, but it was a path. It was theirs. “Then we start from there.”