Page 21 of Ricochet
But it wasn’t fine. Nothing about this fucking situation was fine. My twin brother was a drug addict who, by the way, didn’t want to admit that he was one. My sister was just a kid, forced into an engagement with a person she couldn’t stand. My mother was behaving as if our father saved baby turtles on a daily basis, and Tristan tried to fuck his way through North America. I didn’t need a mirror to see my demons dancing around me. I could feel them without one.
“What are you doing here?” my brother asked. What was I doing here? Hiding, sulking, thinking. His dark hair fell over his eyebrow as he looked at the same spot I was focused on before. “Do you think she’s okay?”
“She fucking better be.”
“But what if she isn’t?
“No.”
“But Kieran—”
“I said, no. She is okay. She has to be okay.”
My chest burned, but it must have been the cigarette, right? It was the heartburn because I didn’t eat anything. It wasn’t choking me because I was thinking of her lifeless body somewhere, all alone, thrown to the wolves. No, no, it wasn’t that.
Cillian kept quiet, but I could feel his eyes on me. Truth to be told, I didn’t know what I would do if she really was dead. The radio silence from the Asters was making me uneasy. Even Nikolai hadn’t passed by in a very long time, and I wasn’t sure what his arrangement with my father was anymore. Both of them held power over two very strong criminal organizations, but there was no doubt that Nikolai held the reins of a much stronger horse.
“Are we expecting anybody today?” Cillian asked, and I turned toward the pathway leading to our house. The evening fog was slowly settling onto the bay, but I could clearly see the lights of a car, driving up to our gate. I couldn’t see the plates nor the type from the front porch where we stood, but with our house being the only one on the hill, they were most definitely coming here.
“Father’s associates maybe,” I murmured, but Father never brought his business here, unless it was Nikolai and his goons. For all of his mistakes, he never wanted our mother to know the true span of monstrosities he was capable of.
The gate opened slowly, and neither of us moved a muscle, awaiting to see who was coming. They weren’t a threat, that’s for sure, otherwise the guards would have alerted us already. Was it somebody familiar? The windows of the black Audi were tinted and I couldn’t see who was sitting inside, nor did I know who this car belonged to.
Cillian reached for the gun on his hip as the car slowed to a stop on the roundabout in front of our house. A heartbeat, or maybe two, and I slowly walked down the stairs, leaving my brother behind me. It looked like a bad scene in a horror movie. Birds couldn’t be heard, the impending doom in the air at the arrival of an unknown person, and I half expected us to start getting attacked by Hitchcock’s ravens to come out of nowhere and attack us here.
The engine of the car quieted down, but nobody exited. I could almost feel the nervous energy radiating off of my brother in spades, and after the fucking circus of a year we had, I completely understood why. The unknown in our world was an extremely bad thing.
Know your enemy and all of that bullshit.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my hands gripping the insides of my pockets. Father would’ve told us if we were having guests, especially with our mother’s constant need for perfection.
The door lock clicked, and the one on the other side of the car slowly opened, revealing the back of a person, their head covered in what looked like a hoodie. A leather jacket hugged their body, but they couldn’t be taller than five foot eight. This person looked slender, tiny… feminine.
He or she stood at the open door for a moment, as if taking in the surroundings. My pulse spiked, the familiarity creeping inside my bones, then the door closed and the person slowly turned around.
A sledgehammer to my chest would have had less of an impact than the sight in front of me.
The ocean eyes I’ve been looking for, I’ve been praying for, connected with mine, sucking the breath out of me. Her skin was paler, her face gaunt, but the smile that appeared erased all of my worries from before.
“Ophelia,” I croaked. She ran around the car toward me, throwing herself into my arms. I only had a second to pull my hands out of my pockets and grab her, as she circled her legs around my waist, and clung to me like a monkey. “Phee,” I whispered in her hair as the cap of her hoodie fell off. I squeezed her tight, holding her to me.
She was alive.
She was here.
My heart was going a million beats per minute as I held her, as I tried to tell myself this wasn’t a dream. She was laughing, and it sounded like a fucking symphony to me. A perfect symphony to calm my racing heart.
“You’re here.”
If I could, I would’ve hidden her inside of me, next to my heart, so that she could never disappear again.
“You’re really here.”
“I’m here.” She leaned back, her arms still around my neck. “I’m really here, K.”
“But how… Why… Where—”
“I’ll explain everything.” She kept smiling, and I couldn’t control my need to kiss her. I pulled her head to mine, our lips clashing in the process. It was as if life had finally returned to me. I hadn’t felt this alive for almost a year.
