Chapter Thirty-Five Tyler #2
But for her, for what she’s suffered … Even if it is impossible to take out every bit of trash, they will pay.
A blink later, I decide that seeking their destruction out will mark the start of my repentance, which is all I have left.
My sins against her are far too great for any forgiveness on her part.
Too fucking damning to even ask for it, and so I won’t dare.
But for what she’s endured, I’ll take out every fucking one of them. Every one of those sick fucks.
Nausea churns my gut at the memory of the night I made a similar promise to Tobias.
When we bear witness to the same type of evil in a hotel room in Paris, just after finally cracking Dom’s laptop.
My promise to T echoing in my ears as I restrained him on that hotel floor because he was so distraught by the horrors that poisoned his brother’s mind in the year before he died.
“We’ll get every single fucking one of them, T. I swear to you, man. We’ll get them all. Every single fucking one.”
The videos we bore witness to that night after we cracked Dom’s files haunted us for endless days after.
Simultaneously jumpstarting our crusade since we left Paris.
Leaving a trail of vengeance and vigilante justice in our wake that spread like wildfire.
Our collective wrath leaving so much carnage in the aftermath that the media caught on and began reporting.
Which left us no choice but to follow suit and report the truth.
The very truth that led to Larissa’s knock on my door and her warning to stop bragging about our accomplishments. That they were looking for us …
What we’d witnessed on that laptop was exactly the type of sick evidence we found in Ciro’s house. The conditions … the screams … the nature of the videos … even the cavernous background and old quality …
Images start to shutter in one by one as I brace myself against the sink, bile climbing my throat as I frantically start to connect the dots and Delphine’s words reach me.
“You will one day find out that the longer you play this game, Soldier, how small this world truly is and how few real players there are.”
“No,” I croak, all breath leaving me as I flash to the image of Larissa the first night we got to camp—pants lowered as I dispensed a dose of morphine, pausing at the sight of the birthmark on her hip.
A mark I’ve brushed my finger over a dozen times or more now.
A mark I’d pressed my lips to more than once, unable to recognize why it called to me, fucking pained me.
It’s as I hover above the three of us in that hotel room in France, and recognize what’s on-screen, that truth of why the sight of it hurt me stares right back at me. Why the mark called to me, and why I gave it so much attention.
“Jesus Christ, no!” I boom a second before I burst out of my bathroom door. Within a blink, I’m rushing toward my living room to see Tobias already stalking toward me, Dom’s open laptop on the counter just behind his shoulder.
“T,” I croak, and dread ripples over his expression as he hastens his steps toward me, his whispers urgent, knowing, confirming.
“Breathe, brother. Please, breathe,” Tobias coaxes as my heart speeds past its limits, threatening to detonate as hellfire eviscerates my insides. In seeing it, Tobias begins to sprint toward me, shouting for Russell as I break for the laptop.
“NO!” I roar as Tobias snatches me to him, keeping me in his vise grip just as I start to lose my fight with gravity.
The weight of it too much to hold. Sagging in his arms, I manage to glimpse the image he paused on-screen.
The very same footage we saw in Paris, just as Larissa’s words traverse back to me.
“Hell isn’t hot, Tyler. It’s dark and cold, and you never know what or who is coming for you.”
“NO!” I boom again as I stretch myself toward the reality sitting on the counter, the video stilled on the bloodied hand of a dark-haired boy, no more than seven or eight years old.
A fresh jagged cut between his thumb and forefinger, marking him into human slavery as others were in similar videos.
But it’s what’s in the space between his bloody, parted fingers that has me seizing in T’s arms. A very visible and recognizable birthmark.
One I had touched on the hip of a woman, not a little girl.
Not a little girl.
“No,” I croak, searching my brother’s face as he helplessly looks back to me, his expression fueling the hellfire roaring inside me.
“T, please, please, no,” I frantically beg as I feel a second set of hands gripping me.
Vision blurring as I absorb the truth that Ciro didn’t stop with the sacrifice of his firstborn.
My entire system rejects the reality of it as a sob reaches my ears, but not my own.
Face twisted in anguish, tears running freely down his jaw, Russell grips me just as tightly to him as an agony I’ve never experienced engulfs me whole.
More evidence of my failure, of our collective failure in addressing Dom’s silent war and pain.
At the loss of what I could have been, at what we all could have been for her. If only we had listened, prodded Dom more, we could have helped shoulder the burden of the nightmares that plagued him, and freed Larissa from Ciro so long ago. Maybe her brother too.
If we had pivoted when Dom begged us to … if I had tracked those fucking guns sooner and not let the trail go cold … I could have wiped Ciro from this earth and dismantled his sick fucking circus. If—if—
“No! Jesus Christ, no!” I shout as Russell and Tobias keep me upright, as Tobias rapidly whispers the same assurances I gave him.
Ravaged by my failure, I crumble in their collective hold.
In ashes as the fire finishes me, leaving me scattering in the depths of my mistakes and clear in who I’ve become.
Her new monster, who destroyed what was left of her trust while snuffing out what light she had remaining.
She confessed she sought me out as her way out of the dark.
And if I had only reached back for her, she could have been mine too.
It was my lack of faith in light itself that destroyed us and, in turn, has destroyed me.
Blink. Black.
Staring blankly into the sea of cars from my balcony, I rattle in my skin, unable to handle every second that ticks as I burn in the remaining embers of rapture.
On the other side of dissociating from everything she stirred within me, I’m now trapped inside every single one I denied.
Everything I denied growing more powerful, even as I grow weaker with every fucking beat she made solid.
Feeling more alive than I have since Delphine left me, and more of a dead man in knowing it.
As I stare blankly down at the world, at life surrounding me, aware of the human noise, I finally allow the condemnation and screams of the fifteen-year-old boy that Larissa unearthed to reach me.
Deserving every vicious lash of his tongue, remembering his first promise to himself.
A promise that stemmed from and was created when he first heard his parents fighting.
That grew stronger after seeing what it did to the women he cared most for—his mother, Delphine, and later, Cecelia—not to mention countless others.
An oath to myself, never to be broken in the wake of their collective heartbreak.
I’ve seen weapons of mass destruction, knives that can sever flesh and penetrate bone, and bullets that can rip through the strongest armor, but the most destructive thing on this earth I have ever witnessed the aftermath of is—love.
Whether it’s ignored, abused, withheld, or completely reciprocal, it’s the most lethal thing on earth when wielded as a weapon.
In breaking that vow, I abused the power of her attraction and the affection I realized she genuinely had for me.
The mystery of where it stemmed from was the only thing that kept me mentally warring until our fallout and her confession.
Out of fear and cowardice, I broke my vow to complete a mission. In doing so, I’m now guilty of what I despise most in men.
Unable to handle another second in my own mind, I stalk to the sliding glass door and open it, catching Tobias and Russell in another muted back-and-forth. The second Russell spots me, he makes a beeline for me, intercepting Tobias, seemingly for my protection.
“Where are you right now?” he asks, tiptoeing over cracked eggshells as he weighs my state. But that’s precisely how I feel—cracked. In a perpetual state of emotional vertigo. Unable to handle the sharp precision of this reality, blinking out whenever I can’t relive every intimate second we shared.
To keep any trace or memory of her, period. It’s been worth my absence to escape the truth of who I’ve become, but I know I can’t press much further into it for fear I’ll never fucking come back.
Knowing I deserve to feel the burn for my deception, I’m blinking out less and less, wanting and deserving every part of the punishment. My concern is now more for her than myself. My penance waiting.
My own self-loathing aside, I can only imagine what the aftermath of my actions has done to her.
I watched her slow withdrawal after her confession.
Visibly and physically felt her start to detach herself from me, and her own emotions, as I stood, utterly paralyzed by her truth.
Within the release of a few tears and long, sobering blinks, I watched her check out before she turned her back on me.
And that transformation is on me, because it was I who continually baptized her by hellfire.
For loving and believing in me.
For trying to fucking save me.
“Tell me,” I snap as the pain of that gnawing truth starts to eat me alive. Knowing whatever is idling on Russell’s tongue is punishment I deserve. That I want. “Just fucking tell me,” I snap again between them.