Page 196 of Unleashed
My stomach turns inside out.
The bile rises so fast and so violently, I can't stop it. I shove back from the desk, the chair crashing behind me, and I'm on my feet and moving, but my legs aren't working right, and Islam into the doorframe with my shoulder, and then I'm in the hallway, hands braced against the wall, and my body empties.
Everything. All of it. Every ounce of bourbon and coffee and nothing that's been keeping me upright for three weeks comes up onto the hardwood floor of my house. My knees buckle, and I'm down, retching, sweat pouring down my face, tears I didn't authorize streaming from my eyes, and I can't stop. My body is rejecting something my mind has been trying to reject for weeks, and it's finally winning.
I hear Jett swear. Hear Colten's boots coming fast. Hear Romeo close the laptop.
I push myself off the wall. Stand up. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.
And then something detonates inside me.
Not grief. Not sadness. Something underneath both. Something that's been building in my chest since the night I walked out of her parents' house, compounding every day, pressurized by every sleepless night.
I grab the hallway table and flip it. The lamp shatters against the wall. The bowl of keys scatters across the floor. I put my fist through the plaster beside the door and feel the drywall crack around my knuckles, and I don't stop. I hit it again. The framed photo next to it falls, and the glass explodes on the hardwood, and I reach for the next thing, the coat rack, and I rip it from the wall and hurl it down the hallway so hard it takes a chunk of the doorframe with it.
"Ace!" Colten's voice.
I'm not listening. I grab the bookshelf in the living room doorway and drag it forward. Books cascade onto the floor. The wood groans and splinters. I kick the base of it, and it collapses sideways, crashing into the wall, and I'm already moving, grabbing the whiskey glass from the side table and launching it at the far wall where it explodes into a spray of crystal.
I think about the time I smashed up Reese's apartment with Lola and Hunter. That was fun because it wasn’t my shit. I need to fuckin’ stop, but I can’t. I need to take this out on something before I combust.
My hands are bleeding, and drywall dust is in my lungs. I'm breathing so hard that each exhale sounds like a growl, and the house around me looks like a crime scene, and I don't care. I don't care about the plaster or the glass or the bookshelf or any of it because none of it matters. Nothing in this house matters if she's not in it.
Colten appears in front of me. He just stands there. In my path with his hands by his sides.
I stare at him.
"You done?" he asks.
I look at my hands. At the destruction around me. At the hole in the wall where my fist went through. At my father's bookshelf in pieces on the floor.
Something cracks in me. The rage collapses inward, and what it leaves behind is worse. I’ve got nothing left to break except myself.
"I can't do this, Colt."
My voice doesn't sound like mine.
He nods. "I know. Come outside."
I let him steer me to the front door. My legs are heavy. My hands are throbbing. The daylight is too bright when he pushes the screen door open and guides me onto the porch.
I slide down the porch column until I'm sitting on the boards with my back against the wood.
Colten lowers himself down beside me. He doesn't speak.
There's a clink of glass. I look up. He's holding a bottle of whiskey. Already opened. He takes a drink and holds it out.
“I get the first bit, I don’t want to drink your puke,” he says.
I half grin. It’s all I’ve got in me.
I take it. The bourbon burns down my throat and lands in my empty, ruined stomach, and I take another pull because the fire is better than what was there before.
We sit in silence. Staring at a ranch that's been in our family for three generations while the world closes in around us.
"She looked miserable," Colten says eventually.
"Yeah."
