Page 63 of Ricochet
My middle finger stood in the funny position, and seeing where my eyes went, he crouched and took a hold of it. His eyes connected with mine, and in the next second he pulled the said finger down, straight down. They say that once you hit one nerve ending, it travels to the rest of them in your body. I could feel that broken bone in every single part of my being. I could almost picture the fucked-up state my bone was in already.
He pressed on it, squishing my hand between his and the wooden armrest.
Don’t you fucking dare scream.
And I didn’t. I didn’t scream, but that obviously didn’t sit well with him.
“Last chance, Ophelia.”
“Fuck you!” My right eye was closing, swelling from the punch he gifted me with. “Even if I did know something, I would never tell it to a Nightingale. You are nothing but a sad excuse of a man, looking for answers in all the wrong places.”
His expression became blank, and he turned his back to me, pulling my attention to the other two, who no doubt were just waiting for their turn. With swift movements, he faced me again and his fist connected with the other side of my head, sending me into a dark abyss.
Motherfucking son of a bitch.
Cillian pacedthe length of the room, giving me a fucking headache, while I crouched in front of the chair Ophelia was strapped to. I could hear Tristan’s voice somewhere behind me, arguing with somebody, but I was too focused on the knocked-out hellraiser to pay attention to whatever he was saying. There was an ongoing battle inside of me —one side didn’t give a fuck she was in this position in front of us, her head hanging, and blood seeping from the cuts on her hand and her cheek. The other side, that was the side I needed to silence.
That side wanted me to pick her up, and save her from this place. It wanted to heal the part of her that pushed us all into insanity.
“Is this what madness feels like?”
Her words from that night, from the fucking night that started changing everything, kept repeating in my head. Is it, is this madness?
We fought so much against it —against our families, our upbringing, everything that was making us this way, and for what? Only to end up in the same spot, if not, the worst one. I sometimes had a feeling that I was going on as a broken record, repeating over and over again how much she destroyed us, but I did the same.
What would’ve happened if I were stronger, smarter… What could we have been if we managed to escape all those years ago, instead of staying and trying to fight? They made an assassin out of her, a coldhearted, psychotic assassin. And I… I didn’t even know who I was anymore.
Was I a killer, a son, a lover, or was I just a lost man, trying to find his place in this sick world?
I stood up and walked toward her, fighting the urge to touch her, to make sure she was still alive. Even with the slow rising and falling of her chest, a clear indication she was still with us, I just wanted to hold her. Motherbitch, this is exactly what I didn’t want to happen.
I didn’t want to feel anything toward her. I didn’t want to love her. I didn’t want to care if she lived or died, I just didn’t want to have this suffocating feeling inside of me, drowning me, pushing me deeper.
Like a weight sitting on my chest, that’s what it felt like. As if somebody placed ten thousand pounds on me, and I carried it. I carried it well, but I didn’t want to do it anymore. I just wanted this fucking feeling to disappear.
I wanted her to disappear, to be gone. I needed to be free of this hold she had on me.
“Why, Phee?” I murmured. “I just want to fucking know, why.”
She was unconscious, unresponsive, but this was the only time I would even dare uttering these words. This woman, this beautiful, broken, sadistic woman in front me, she fed on other people’s emotions.
Good and bad.
“Kieran.” Tristan’s voice penetrated through the haze, through the pain my mind was putting me in. I turned only to see the tightness around his lips, and a worried look on his face.
“What happened?”
Ophelia thought Tristan was the weak one, when in reality he was the strongest. He was the only one whose mind didn’t get broken with everything that happened. The only one who could keep all of us in touch with reality, and the only one who had enough patience to deal with all of the administrative things I simply didn’t want to do.
I was the leader, that was correct, but only because I took it upon myself to be the one who decided who lived and who died. I didn’t want that shit on my brothers, no matter how much we fought. The two of them already suffered enough with Ava’s passing, and everything our father was throwing at us. This was the least I could do.
He held the phone in both of his hands, his skin becoming pale with every passing second.
“What the fuck happened, Tristan?” My patience was running thin and knowing that he usually wasn’t the one to worry unnecessarily, his whole demeanor was creating sinister thoughts in my mind. Was it our mother? Did something happen to her?
“We have a problem.”
“What kind of a problem?” Cillian asked, leaning on the wall behind Ophelia.
