He didn't.
He walked in the other direction, carrying all of it out into the dark with him.
---
The cold hit him properly once he was past the outer lights.
It was a different cold here, not the institutional chill of the facility's corridors, but the living cold of the natural world. The cold that moved on the wind, that settled into the spaces between trees, that had its own agenda and its own timing.
He didn't stop to button his jacket.
The bleeding from his mouth had slowed to nothing, just a dried smear along his chin that he wiped away with the back of his hand. His ribs ached with every breath in a way that would purple by morning, that would make sleeping difficult, that would remind him of this night for days to come.
But the cold felt cleaner than the corridor had.
Cleaner than the room where Maya slept with her hand over her stomach, making promises she didn't know if she could keep.
Cleaner than the look on Richard's face.
He walked.
No direction. Just away.
