Thousands (Dollar, #4)

by Pepper Winters

My awful slur of ‘You’re not worth it,’ echoed sickly, making me suffocate with self-hatred.

She’d swum into my veins and infiltrated my soul without me knowing. By the time I understood what she’d done…it was too late. She’d reached inside my chest and fished out my heart. She’d gutted it, filleted it, and slapped it on a goddamn frying pan.

But unfortunately, by taking my heart, she’d given me something I’d been lacking since the flames ate my childhood and family.

She’d given me culpability.

She was worth it. Ten times, no, a thousand times fucking worth it.

She had to accept my lies as truth—had to see me as the addict I was and not the quixotic lover she hoped.

If I could avoid Pimlico for a few days…a week maybe…then I could forget the nirvana of being inside her and go back to the way things were. Platonic things. Rescuer and recovering things.

Am I in love? Was that what churned inside my chest? The sickening knowledge that I would throw myself out of the window if it meant it was the only way to keep Pim safe, or was it yet another layer of guilt knowing what she’d lived?

Yet again, something else had been stolen from me: the value of things.

All night, I’d been a game of roulette as my mind spun the wheel and my choices between staying away and returning became the little white ball. Sometimes, that ball landed on red. Red…the colour of love, of passion, of blood and rage and lust. But sometimes, it landed on black. Black…the colour of desperation, of grief, of wrongness and hate and confusion and pain.

You didn’t leave for you. That reminder—that righteous thorn in my side—gave me strength. I can do this. For him. Inhaling hard, I strode onward.

Our love was over before it ever began.

He’d boarded the Phantom, taken one last look at Monaco, and left. Something fissured inside me. Something akin to a blade filleting my heart from my ribcage. Short, intense, blistering in its viciousness.

She would remain mine. I should’ve seen this coming. I should’ve sensed the warning signs: the first time my heart tap danced when she smiled. The moment when my gut clenched because her happiness affected my future rather than just my present. The second my entire body drenched in sensitivity whenever she came near. All those warning signs I’d ignored or misread. But now I understood the message. I was dead without her. I was alive with her. Simple.

By loving her, I not only doomed myself but her too. She would be a part of my world—a world she still knew so little about. A world where war was coming, death was hunting, and curses were sure to rule.

I couldn’t win with this woman. I didn’t stand a fucking chance. I was completely, utterly, undeniably hers until time stopped ticking or the world stopped spinning—whatever came first. I’d never felt that before.

My promise was my life. And I’d just given it to Elder, wrapped in a bow, gifted in a box, willingly donated with my heart.

How could a smile have so many different dialects and conversations? How could I understand the nuisances behind different shaped lips?

The scraps of his affection had been as unique and beautiful as stars.

Love. Love was my limitation and flaw combined. I needed to love as much as I needed to be loved. It wasn’t a whimsical thing—it went deeper than that.

This was pure fucking love, and I sank to the bottom of it and didn’t care if I drowned.

“You’ve stolen my heart.”

Second thing that happened that night—after a strained but survived dinner—I created her a dolphin out of a hundred dollar bill, quickly bringing the total of origami animals closer to a thousand in cash value.

Literally S.I.M.P.L.E. Sometimes Impossible Mostly Probable Largely Explainable.

Passion I’d never let myself indulge in set us alight and made us burn. Blaze. Cremate beneath the mastership of longing.

I had no impulse supremacy or dominion over my unbreakable rules—they’d all turned to useless dust.

Her hand came up to cup my cheek—shocking me stupid with the tenderness of it. “Elder…you have me. Do whatever you need.” I swallowed some filthy reply. Some terrible sentence accepting her gift even knowing how wrong I was to do it but then her eyes filled with pure love, bathing me in redemption and approval. She fucking slaughtered me.

Looking at Elder, I didn’t think I could ever erase him or scratch off the letters he’d written on my heart. No matter how much or how little time we spent together. He was permanent. Inked. Tattooed. And if he didn’t start trusting me to share his life and help him, he would also be thrown overboard.

I had opinions. I wanted to voice them. I had dreams. I wanted to live them. I had desires. I wanted to enjoy them. I had fears. I wanted to slay them.

I understood who I was in the worst of times. I only needed to know who I was in the best of them.

My feelings were enamoured because she used her healing as a ladder. One rung at a time. Each one climbing higher and higher from her past and hardship, slowly growing bolder and more beautiful each height she scaled.

She wasn’t alive because of me. I was living because of her.

And when Elder murmured Japanese into my hair then bowed as if he was a knight laying his sword at my feet, my heart had fallen upon his blade in terror.

unbuckled a piece of my past and deposited the terrible weight. Discarding one tiny piece of luggage—throwing away a satchel or a duffel filled with screams and silence—and finally had the courage to stroll away without it.

Because gifts such as these…they deserved a hundred kisses. A thousand. More.

The girl I owed a thousand apologies.

A pretty flower opened and still standing even after every petal had been damaged by plucking human fingers.

I had so much to feel and no heart capable of such things. So I did the only thing I could.

To finally admit there was no bottom when it came to falling in love. That each time I thought I’d reached the end, another crevice appeared to trip into.

How many times would I tumble for this woman?

And how many times could I...

I find bruises rather beautiful…the range of colours fascinates me even though the pigmentation is the body’s way of healing from pain. Maybe that’s why I love them.”

“Fuck me, Elder Prest. Be a man and fuck me.”

I rode him while he rode me, and I took back every last piece of my sexuality on the floor of Hawksridge Hall.

Trust. That one terrible gift.