75. Dancing With The Devil
CHAPTER 75
DANCING WITH THE DEVIL
NATE
Consciousness melts like ice under a blowtorch. My brain’s a warzone of fractured thoughts. The needle burns cold fire in my arm, but I’m gone—floating somewhere between the ceiling and space, between pain and peace.
Through the haze, “ Angel” by Aerosmith bleeds through crackling speakers. The sound’s warped and distant, like a memory trying to resurface from the bottom of a lake.
It’s her favorite song.
The one that played the night we chased the sunrise in the Mustang—windows down, her bare feet on the dash, wind tangling in her hair.
Steven Tyler wails about salvation, all grit and desperation, and it slices straight through the fog in my head.
For the first time, I finally get it.
I finally understand why she always said this song was about more than love. She said it was about finding the one person who saw all your cracks and didn’t flinch.
Nora told me I didn't need fixing. It was true, though not in the way she meant it.
What I needed was saving, a hand reaching into the darkness to pull me back from the edge I've been walking since I was old enough to understand what destruction looked like.
Fucking tragic, I know. The kind of melodramatic shit I'd mock someone else for saying. But with her blood still under my fingernails and her life hanging by threads I can't see or control, I'm beyond caring how pathetic it sounds.
It was her love, always her love, that tethered me to this world when everything else turned to shit—when the reflection in the mirror started looking too much like the man I swore I'd never become.
Now, with this poison numbing the ache and dragging me under, the sound of that song and her voice, it’s the only thing keeping me from slipping all the way.
My muscles twitch and spasm, a desperate dance beneath my skin. Each heartbeat stretches longer than the last, time losing meaning as the high claims me. The needle offers oblivion, but her memory offers something I've never deserved but always craved—forgiveness.
The song loops, and with each rotation, the line between Heaven and Hell blurs further. Angels and demons trade places in the lyrics until I can't tell which one I'm begging to save me. She appears in the darkness behind my eyelids, a ghost made of regret and unspoken words. Those green eyes that always saw straight through my bullshit are swimming with tears now.
Don't look at me like that, Leni.
You knew what I was from the start.
But the thought slips away before I can hold onto it, just another piece of me scattered to the wind.
The euphoria hits like a tidal wave of liquid gold, burning away every scar, every mistake, every moment I've spent trying to outrun my father's shadow. The void opens beneath me, beautiful and endless, promising the peace I've never found in sobriety.
The devil sits beside me in the darkness, patient as an old friend. We don't need words anymore—we both know this dance by heart.
They say silence is where demons come to play, but they never tell you how seductive the darkness can be. How it wraps around you like a lover's arms, promising to keep all your secrets.
The rush floods my veins, offering to erase it all—the way her blood felt on my hands, Jake's last words echoing in my skull, the poison legacy running through my veins. When you've waltzed with the devil this long, you forget there was ever any other partner to choose.
Some angels can't save what doesn't want saving.
The void swallows me whole, and for the first time since that night everything went wrong, I don't fight it.
I just fall.