Chapter XXVIII : Red Path
JFK Airport was a living organism. It breathed, pulsed, teemed with people coming and going like blood in the veins of a giant of glass and steel. Cassandra paused for a moment before the enormous windows of Terminal 4: the sky was a milky gray, cut by the contrails of planes taking off one after another, as if the entire world was in a hurry to go elsewhere.
Her stomach was a knot. Not of fear — Cassandra hadn't been afraid in years — but of something subtler, harder to name. Agitation, perhaps. Anticipation. Guilt.
Ksenia was in there, in that knot. Every thought returned to her.
Cross was beside her, still as a statue. His presence was an anchor: silent, solid, professional. He didn't speak, didn't ask anything. He didn't need to know more. He knew why they were there.
Leo, Nyx, Livia, and Cole had remained at the operations base. She imagined them in front of the monitors, already ready to follow them from New York, to track every movement, every signal, every mistake.
She and Cross, instead, were the tip of the spear. Shiraz was waiting for them.
And in the desert, somewhere, Ksenia was waiting for her.
Cassandra breathed deeply. The airport smell was a mixture of burnt coffee, metal, disinfectant, and perfumes that were too expensive. Voices overlapped: metallic announcements, crying children, suitcases rolling across the shiny floor, hurried footsteps. Everything seemed to move too fast, while inside her everything was still.
Rhea arrived without making a sound.
Cassandra only saw her when she was in front of her.
The embrace was long. Silent.
Rhea wasn't a person who hugged often. She wasn't a person who showed much. But in that moment, her arms around Cassandra were a promise, an order, a prayer.
When they parted, Rhea pulled a small object from her jacket pocket: an old CD, its surface scratched, the transparent case worn by time. And a portable player, the kind that hadn't been seen in years.
"Bring her home," she said.
Her voice was low, but it didn't tremble.
"Listen to these songs during the journey. They'll keep you company."
Cassandra looked at the CD as if it were a talisman.
She nodded. "I'll bring her home."
Rhea placed a hand on her cheek, a rare gesture, almost sacred.
Then she turned and walked away, without adding anything else.
Cross gestured.
It was time.
They crossed the gate. The airport noise became muffled, as if the world had decided to let them go. Cassandra felt her heart accelerate as she walked toward the jet. Every step was a memory of Ksenia: her voice, her smile, her anger, her disappearance.
When the plane took off, New York shrank beneath them.
The skyscrapers became lines.
The streets, thin veins.
The noise of the city faded, replaced by the constant hum of the engines.
Cassandra looked out the window.
The sky was immense.
The world beneath her was receding.
The desert was waiting for her.
Ksenia was waiting for her.
And Cassandra, for the first time in days, let the agitation pass through her without fighting it.
It was the price to pay for those who wanted to bring someone home.
---
She opened the CD player.
The click of the plastic was an ancient, familiar sound. Her fingers trembled as she inserted the disc Rhea had given her. The surface was scratched, worn from years of listening, from a thousand hands that had touched it before hers.
The first notes filled the headphones.
A deep bass, almost threatening. A distorted guitar that hit like a punch to the gut. Then the voice — a female voice, dirty, scratchy, that asked no permission. She sang of nights spent staring at the ceiling, of loves that had burned too fast, of women who had lost themselves in the corridors of their own minds.
It wasn't a love song.
It was a song of war.
Cassandra closed her eyes. The notes hit her like slaps.
The album had a name no one remembered anymore. It had been recorded in a Brooklyn basement, on a stormy night, by a woman who had lost everything and had decided to scream it at the world. Rhea had found it at a flea market years before and had kept it like a talisman.
"When you need to feel something real" — Rhea had told her when she handed it over. — "Not beautiful. Real."
The music continued.
The rhythm was irregular, almost broken, like a heart that no longer knew how to beat steadily. The voice rose, cracked, recovered. It spoke of bodies that search for each other in the dark, of hands that hold too tight, of kisses that taste of blood and broken promises.
Cassandra felt the knot in her throat.
It wasn't melancholy. It was rage.
The rage of having lost her.
The rage of not having looked for her sooner.
The rage of not having held her tight enough.
She thought about the gunshot.
Not the sound — she had buried that so deep even she didn't know where to find it. She thought about what had happened after. The silence. The void. The empty bed. The pillowcase that still smelled of her.
Before: Ksenia laughing, holding her, whispering "I love you" in uncertain Italian, with that accent that melted every defense.
After: nothing. The phone that didn't ring. The message that never came. The body that wasn't there.
She thought about the marriage.
That promise that was there, suspended between them like a golden thread someone had cut with a dry stroke. A ghost. A finger pointed at her.
The music accelerated.
The drums came in like a fist, wild, uncontrolled. The voice was screaming now, no longer singing. It spoke of women lost in the desert, of sand that enters the lungs, of eyes that turn red as blood.
Cassandra felt the tears.
But they weren't tears of sadness.
They were tears of fury.
The fear of being rejected.
The fear that Ksenia, at that moment, was in Freyja's arms.
That Freyja possessed her, carnally, violently.
That she was breaking her, changing her, taking her away.
The fear that Ksenia was no longer Ksenia.
The fear that she didn't want her anymore.
The fear that Cassandra had arrived too late.
And the fear, that fear she had buried with Liora, that fear she believed she had killed forever, that fear resurfaced like a corpse that refuses to sink.
Not the fear of dying.
The fear of not having been enough.
The music continued. The voice was a scream now, a lament that asked no mercy. It spoke of loss, of impossible returns, of hands that can no longer be held. It spoke of the desert. It spoke of blood. It spoke of her.
Cassandra didn't notice Cross until she felt his fingers on the headphones.
He tore them off.
Not gently. With a sharp, decisive gesture that brooked no argument.
Then he turned off the CD player. Silence fell like a boulder.
"Director Hale."
She looked at him. She didn't understand why her face was wet. She brought her hands to her face. Her fingers found the tears — warm, salty, endless.
She didn't remember crying.
"Fuck," she whispered.
Cross looked at her. He said nothing. He wasn't the type for useless words. But in his eyes there was something she had never seen before. Not compassion. It was something else. Recognition.
"You need to breathe," he said. His voice was flat, but not cold. "If you keep this up, you'll break."
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"I'm already broken," Cassandra said.
Her voice didn't tremble. It was flat. Empty. As if she had emptied everything into those tears.
Cross didn't reply. He just stood beside her, still, a presence that asked for nothing.
Cassandra looked at the CD player. The case was worn, scratched. The disc inside was still warm.
"Rhea knew," she murmured.
"Knew what?"
"That I needed to feel something real."
Cross looked at her. His silence was an anchor, a solid presence in the midst of chaos.
"And did you feel it?" he asked.
Cassandra breathed in. Her chest hurt. Not physically — it was a pain that came from much deeper, from a place that had no name.
"Yes," she said. "I felt it."
She turned back toward the window.
The sky was still there.
Immense.
Indifferent.
But inside her, something had changed.
It wasn't peace. It wasn't healing.
It was the awareness that the rage was still there, alive, pulsing, ready to be used.
And she would use it.
To the last drop of blood.