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“So,” Kade continues, “back to what I was saying because we got distracted.” He thrusts his fingers faster, and I cry out as a wave of pleasure hits me. It happens again, and again, until my orgasm overtakes the feeling, and I’m seeing stars and moaning.
“Fuck, she’s soaking and tightening around my fingers, Christopher. I bet you wish you were me. I bet you always wished you could be me. She’s fucking drenched for me. Do you know what it feels like to be loved by her? To see a future with her? To watch her grow your child, only to lose it because of a piece-of-shit jealous cunt?” Chris is trembling, yanking at his restraints still – fighting against them to try to…
I hear the door opening – Tobias and Barry are standing there – then Chris starts calling out my name, stopping me at the stairs, but he’s silenced when Kade smashes a hammer into the side of his face.
“Don’t be afraid of me, Freckles,” he calls, spitting out blood that’s leaked into his mouth. “This is for us.”
He’s psycho
I can hear Tobias laughing. I’ve never noticed how evil his laugh sounds.
Her eyes drop to Chris’s mangled face, his fingerless hands, the slashes all over his body, as if Kade and Tobias had gone nuts and started throwing blades around blindly. He has holes in his knees, and a foot is lying off to the side. With this much blood loss, I don’t think Chris will survive. His chest is rising and falling rapidly. How is he still alive?
I push the door open slowly, quietly, to see Kade in the corner of the room, his head bowed and between his legs, rocking back and forth with blood soaking him. His hands fist at his hair, gripping it hard enough that I know it must hurt.
For minutes, maybe hours, we stay like this. Me in front of him, holding him carefully, letting him hear my soft voice as I praise him for sticking up for me. He doesn’t give me a response, or lift his eyes to me, but I know he’s listening.
“She’s not there. She’s not there. She’s not fucking there.” They’re uneven, his face red as he forces each one out. “Stop looking. She’s not there. She’s never there. Not there. No. She’s not there.”
“I’m here. It’s me, Stacey. I’m not going to hurt you.” He slaps the side of his head, his mutters growing louder, and my eyes burn while I watch my first and only love try not to destroy himself. The eighteen-year-old who was nervous to kiss me during a game of dares – who shook nervously when he pressed me into the couch and kissed me – who shared all my firsts and treated me like a princess.
My voice cracks. “I’m your Freckles, remember?” The hand beating against the side of his head stops, and his fingers curl into his palm as he drops it so he can hold his knees with both arms.
“You always loved my singing voice, even though you said you didn’t. It made you laugh. We laughed a lot. When we were drunk and singing karaoke in Greece, or even when we were just lying in bed and talking. We always had that, you know? We kept each other smiling. You gave me a reason to live when I felt like I was already dead inside.”
“You still make me smile. When I think of you, I feel alive. I think of our first date a lot. London. Dinner. Hotel rooms and more firsts. They’re ours. All of those memories are ours. Kade and Stacey. Stacey and Kade. What we had was special.” Kade stops shaking like a leaf, his head still lowered.
I study him. “I haven’t been able to watch The Greatest Showman without crying. I don’t even sing during ‘From Now On’ – can you believe that?”
“I’m glad you designed some tattoos for me. I still have them,” I say, standing up slightly, but the movement still makes him flinch like I’ve hit him. I step back to give him space and pull my hoodie down at the back, showing him our initials warped together with the design he made. “I’ll never cover this one. It’s my favourite.”
Still not giving me his eyes, he flexes his fingers and tilts his head, so he’s looking at the wall. “She’s not there. Don’t talk to her. She’s not there. You aren’t crazy. We aren’t crazy. Because she’s not there.”
“The first time we met, we shared a cigarette. I told you my name, and you just stared at me. I was looking for you and gave up when I reached the pool house. Jason dropped Luciella off at the studio when I first got there, and you were in the truck.”
“And when we got dared to kiss, I got butterflies. I fancied you, and I really didn’t want to embarrass myself during my first kiss.” I sit on the edge of the bed again, our feet close to touching.
“But I was your first kiss too, so I was comfortable. You made those times I was in hell feel like heaven. I wanted to die so many times, wanted it all to end, but I had you, so it was worth it. Living was worth it. I trusted you with all my firsts, just like you trusted me.”
I glance at him, and the breath leaving my lips stutters when I see he’s looking up at me through his messy, wavy hair, his blue eyes burning into me. As if he’s trying to merge my fractured soul with his own.
“You feel alone,” I say, my voice breaking. “So do I.” When he doesn’t look away, I press further, sliding off the bed and onto the floor. “You feel broken.” A beat, and I add, “So do I.”
“I wish we could go back to the day we found out I was pregnant. Sometimes, I picture what she would look like. Blue eyes like yours, hair like mine, and an attitude and personality like your dad.” I snort at myself. “She’d have definitely been a heathen. A three-year-old heathen that we loved infinitely.”
Slowly, shakily, he drops his hand between us, fingers spasming, his skin pale beneath the blood, tattoos and scars, most of his nails bruised. There is no way to describe how I feel right now. I stare at that hand like it’s the present I wanted for Christmas at age six. I lower my own hand, sitting it close to his on the carpet between us, our pinkies slightly grazing.
“Can I hold your hand?” I ask him just as his pinkie spasms next to mine. His body is still curled away from me, his arms still hugging his knees, his head down and angling away. “If you want to, you can take my hand.”
Kade’s entire body tenses with a spasm, and he grabs my hand in an iron grip, squeezing until my fingertips are tight and tingling, his own turning white with how hard he’s holding me.
Kade breaks my heart as he slowly lowers his head to my shoulder. His hair tickles my nose. It’s sticky and tangled in places from Chris’s blood – some of it dried in completely, some still wet from mixing with his sweat – and I run my fingers down and back up, separating the hard clumps while his breathing turns less heavy. “You hate me,” he manages to say, his throat dry and rough. “You’re always going to hate me.”
“I could never hate you, Kade.” The dam explodes, and he grips my wrist to stop me from removing the dried blood from his hair, his shoulders tensing as he lets out a deep sob that will be ingrained in my mind forever. The last time I heard him like this was when we saw the blood on the bed sheets – the moment we knew we’d lost our daughter.
“Forgive me? Please. Please forgive me.” His words are broken, but I understand each one, muffled as he pulls away from my shoulder and drops his head into my lap, hugging the back of my knees. “I’ll do anything. I know we can’t get back what we had, and I’ll never be that eighteen-year-old kid again, but please don’t hate me. Please forgive me. I didn’t want to be like this, Stacey. I didn’t want this. I didn’t… I… Stacey.”
He drops his head again, unable to speak as he sobs and sobs and sobs until he’s barely able to take a breath without it shattering like glass. I can’t speak. I’m struggling to keep it together as I hug him back, holding him.
When he falls back to sleep, I watch him. I watch the way his chest rises and falls, the tension on his face, his dreams obviously causing him stress, even though he’s passed out. Once I’m certain he’ll stay asleep, I lift his hand and kiss his knuckles. “I won’t leave you,” I promise. “And don’t you dare leave me.”
Under the skin of the devil they created, buried in the fucking void of the darkness he’s trapped in, I will find a glimmer of his humanity. Why? Because he’s mine.
It’s no use. The evidence of Kade’s rage is all over the room. A severed foot, slashes everywhere and an evident stab wound to the groin. My own stab wounds are in his thighs, still leaking dark blood.
I know Chris, in his slowly dying body, can hear me. “Chris wanted me to love him, but it was always Kade.”
kills you. Kade might have caused you all the pain you deserved, but it will be me who ends your life.” I harshly slice to the right, the sharp edge of the blade cutting through skin, flesh and muscle. Blood hits my face, mixing with my tears. “I hate you, Chris. And if by some miracle you make it to heaven, I hope my mother kicks your ass. If not…” I lean forward to whisper in his ear as the gurgling stops. “I’ll see you in hell.”
Tobias and Aria found thirty-six scars on his body; four injuries that have gone untreated. He has tattoos covering most of them, but some are still visible.
“I can stream The Greatest Showman on Barry’s laptop. Do you want to watch it? I can’t promise not to sing.” My heart restarts as his head turns to the side, his eyes on me. His chin dips again, but before I can sit up to go get the laptop, he croakily says, “Stay.” “Okay,” I reply in a soft voice, taking his hand from his chest and bringing it to my lips. I press a kiss to his knuckles, waiting to see his reaction. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I frown. “Why what?” He wets his lips, running his hand through his hair, messing it. His words are slurred, his eyes unfocused. “I don’t know why you’re here. Is it… Is it because you f-feel bad? Am I imagining you here? Does Stacey know you’re here? Did you pay me? Have I lost you?” “Kade. I am Stacey.”
“Make it stop,” he says, begs, pleads with me. “Please make it stop. Please, please, please. Do you have my gun? Can I have it? I need to kill them.” He’s hallucinating, flinching like someone threw something at him.
“Did your brother do that?” “All of them are from him,” I reply. “I’ll kill him,” he says, as if he can’t remember he ripped him apart already. “Did Barry locate him?” My heart breaks for Kade.
“I had to do a lot,” he says. His pupils are dilated as he stares through me again. “If she knew what Archie did to me, she’d never go near me again.” “No, that’s not true.” My bottom lip quivers, and I catch it between my teeth, a painful rushing sound in my ears. “I… Stacey loves you.” “Do you think so?”
There’s a tattoo over it, and something in my chest twists as I make out what it is. A bunch of dead roses have been inked across his ribs to hide an injury. I have ones that look the exact same on my back.
After a few minutes of silence, he looks over at me, and his glazed eyes brighten a touch. Confused, he asks, “Is that you, Freckles?” I fist the duvet and pull it over me, tucking it under my chin. “Yeah,” I breathe into the dark. “It’s me.”
The last thing I hear are whispered words in Russian. “Moya vechnost.”
“If you fart in my face, I’ll tell Kade.” I scoff as Tobias pushes me further up the tree with a camera strapped around my neck. “Kade has heard me fart plenty of times, thank you very much.”
Lmaooooooo
“Aria accidentally farted once, and she was mortified. It smelled terrible, and she walked out of the room with the reddest face. I found it cute.” I screw my nose up. “I don’t think anyone has ever referred to my farts as cute.” Tobias snorts. “Well, you aren’t Aria.”
“You relate everything back to her.” He shrugs. “You don’t see her the way I see her. Everything reminds me of Aria.” My foot slips, nearly hitting his face, and I giggle out an apology. “Sweet but obsessive. One would assume you were a psychopath, Mr Mitchell.”
I’ll spend the rest of my life by his side, even if he can barely look at me, register that I’m sitting beside him or speak to me. I’ll hold his hand when he needs me to. I’ll just… be there. Always.
“Why do I waste my time with you?” “Because your dad is dead and I’m the replacement?” Rolling my eyes, I grab a camera and start climbing.
“He doesn’t want you getting caught. I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long, to be honest. You aren’t worried you’ll get caught?” “Nope. I’m good at hiding.” He smirks and nudges me with his elbow, nearly knocking me off my feet. “Not even the law can keep me from Aria.”
Chewing his lip, he sighs. “I haven’t been free for a long time. All I know is Aria. Every morning I wake up, I wonder if she’ll visit me. I’ll reread all her letters. I’ll brush my teeth and imagine she’s doing hers right beside me. When I sleep, I can smell her shampoo, and if I really try, I can almost hear her giggle in the middle of the night. Now I don’t need to imagine it all.” I stare at him, feeling somewhat emotional as he gets annoyed with himself.
