Chapter 91
Damien
Play - Wandering Star by Portishead
Don’t breathe
I line the bullets in the magazine and unload it again before repeating the process over and over again. My mind racing as I think back to what happened earlier today.
Spencer fucking Porter, and Mireya.
The bandage never left my mind since I talked to her.
Neither did the way she looked at me. I think I know her too well, the way she hides pain, how she disappears when she starts drowning.
Working, pretending, I can do that easily.
But saving the woman who ruins me, from herself is out of my reach.
Frustration washes over me. All she wanted me to see is how strong she was. And I made the same choice everyone else always had, I decided for her, I chose what she could survive.
I fucked up. Lying to someone who has been lied to all her life isn’t a good idea. But it was never to hurt her. My stupid brain thought that I could protect her.
I drag my hand through my hair running it down my face. The sound of the door swinging open unexpectedly startles me first. Hayzel…?
My gaze runs over her face. I notice her tear-stained cheeks, the red stretched marks that look like angry handprints and her disheveled attire. My mind freezes even if my body instinctually knows what to do by gripping my weapon.
“HE’S WITH HER!” She whimpers. “Help..me… Please.”
Her?
I rise from my chair, and reach forward towards Hayzel but she grimaces and backs away. “Hey, it’s okay.” I say softly. “I won’t hurt you but, you need to tell me what the hell is going on.”
She shakes her head as if saying the words out loud hurt. “Mireya is still with him… C-Come quickly..” She finally replies without hesitating and I grab her wrist so she can keep up with my pace as I bound out of the door.
Something twists in my heart, as if worry took over my being and I’m only imagining the worst scenarios. Did someone break in while they were getting ready ? Because Hayzel is dressed up like she’s going out.
Was it this bastard, Ethan?
Speaking of him, Hayzel runs to his side, crying like he would understand but he’s just as confused.
“Ethan, it’s… h-he was insane and Mireya… she tried to protect me,” she screams as he’s trying to calm her down.
“Hey, calm down I’m fucking lost, Hayzel, what’s going on?” He asks, and then he sees me behind her. “Why the hell is Mr Caldwell here?”
I’m not even waiting for them to talk or move, I just walk over to their hallway. Something is off. The surveillance cameras I notice are not turned on. I don’t see the flickering red light. I don’t see anything.
Her door is open when I arrive, and I see Mireya on the fucking floor with blood trickling down her head and a broken lamp beside her.
For a second my brain refuses to process it. Then, I crouch down next to her, putting my hand behind her neck.
“Hey—”
She’s not replying and her eyes are still closed. I shift and lean closer to her, my fingers pressing lightly over her jaw, tilting her head enough for me to see her face entirely. I need to find the source. She has a head wound. Someone fucking hit her.
“Can you hear me, Mireya?”
No response. Hayzel and Ethan enter the room and I need them to leave now. I lower closer, not even thinking about space, or rules, or even Hayzel’s sobs.
She’s breathing.
“Open your eyes for me, Reya,” I say again as my hands check for any other injury. She has marks around her neck. Fingerprints. They strangled her.
“Hayzel, what happened?” I ask turning around to see her still sobbing. “Stop crying now and tell me what the fuck happened?”
“She just— she just wanted to protect me and he… he did that to her,” her voice is muffled and Ethan is trying to hold her against him. “Please tell me she’s okay.”
“Go get me some water and something clean. Clothes. Anything. I have something in my office that could help on the shelf. The red box. Bring it in.” I say as I gesture toward the door with my chin. “Bennett, don't let her go alone.”
He nods after a small moment of hesitation.
“Now.”
Movement. Finally.
I shift her slightly, supporting her head before it can roll back against the floor. Glass crunches under my boot but I ignore it. There’s blood along her temple, and those marks…It makes me want to— Calm down, Damien.
I press my sleeve there first, enough to slow down the bleeding.
“Open your eyes for me. Open them, and show me how strong you are.”
I don’t even know if she can hear me. But I continue talking to her as my thumb brushes under her cheek. “Come on, now. You have to open those eyes and scream at me again.”
She’s still breathing, she’s just out of it and it pisses me off because I wasn’t here. I promised her that as long as I was here, the monsters would never reach her and I failed.
Footsteps rush back in. Hayzel kneels beside me holding out a cloth with shaky hands and the red box. I take it without looking and guide it toward her wound. “Hold this. Don’t press too hard, okay?”
She nods and I ask Bennett to open the kit in the meantime. “Gauze, now,” I say without taking my eyes off her.
Everything after this happens in a blur.
I was on my knees next to her, stabilizing her, and the next second I was standing up, with her in my arms. I don’t remember lifting her up or starting to move to the hallway.
I just remember asking Hayzel to not stay alone tonight, and Bennett saying she’s going to stay with him.
“Please take care of her.” Was the only thing I remember her saying. Like she trusted me enough to do so when I actually am the worst at taking care of her.
Mireya’s head stays steady against my arm the whole way to my office and it’s the only thing I focus on. The door opens and I carefully lay her down on the small sofa next to the window. But my hands don’t leave her right away. I check her breathing again, then her pulse, then her face.
And when I saw her eyebrows moving, I finally let out a long breath I was holding. Only then do I step back and grab her hand to kiss it. Holding it like it’s the only thing that matters.
“You fucking scared me.”
But she doesn’t answer. I count her breaths without even wanting to. One, Two, Three, Four… I keep counting, looking at her face, deciding if the anger I felt toward the person who hurt her was stronger than the worry I feel right now.
Then her hand moves and I take a step back.
She wakes like she’s been dropped back into her body instead of returning to it.
There’s a pause before anything makes sense to her.
Eyes open, but not focusing, ceiling first, then the edge of the room, then me, like I’m just another object she has to place correctly.
Her hand goes to her temple before she even sits up properly. Fingers press into the bandage, then stop halfway. “What happened?” she asks softly.
“Someone hurt you.”
She exhales through her nose as if that explanation is inconvenient, “I remember being hit,” she replies. “I mean why am I here?”
“You were unconscious.”
“I’m fine.” She pushes herself up too fast. I see the exact moment her body disagrees with her decision. Her shoulders stiffen, her breath catches, and she fixes it immediately like correcting it erases it from ever happening. “I’m fine,” she repeats.
“No you’re not,” I say.
That should end it, but it doesn’t, because she looks at me properly now. And I can feel it again, the space that’s been missing for days. Her absence.
“You’re checking on everything I do now?”
“Yes,” I say without thinking. “Yes,” I repeat, because I don’t want to soften it. “Because I’m fucking worried. Because you’ve been disappearing every night from the academy and coming back like nothing happens and I’m supposed to just ignore it.”
“You’re tracking me,” she spits out.
“I’m not tracking you.”
“You are when you say it like that,” she replies, swinging her legs over the edge of the sofa like she’s done being contained by this room. “You don’t get to do that,” she adds.
“Do what?”
“Act like you care only when it suits you.”
I step closer without meaning to, and she notices immediately. We both stop like we’ve agreed on a boundary neither of us wants to respect. “You’ve been avoiding me,” I say.
“I haven’t.”
“You have.”
Her laugh is short before she speaks again, “I don’t want to talk to you, and you still show up when I don’t even need you.”
“I showed up because you’re hurt.”
Her eyes narrow slightly, like she regrets giving me the opening. I feel something tighten in my chest, but I don’t move. Because if I move, I’ll close the distance again. And I don’t trust what happens if I do. “You’ve been going out every night,” I say instead.
“So that’s what this is…”
“No.” But it doesn’t sound convincing even to me.
She stands again, slower this time, testing her balance as if she’s trying to prove she can leave without assistance, and she almost makes it. Almost. Then her weight shifts wrong for a second too long and I move without thinking, catching her before she fully compensates.
She stiffens instantly in my grip. “Don’t,” she says.
I let go immediately but I didn't step back. Because she’s still not fully stable, and she knows it too even if she refuses to admit it.
“I’m leaving,” she says again.
“No,” I answer.
“I don’t take orders from you.”
“I’m not giving you a choice,” I say. “You’re not walking out like this.”
She looks at me for a long second, then she exhales sharply and looks away like she’s done fighting that specific part of the argument. “This is your place,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Great,” she mutters. “Then, I’ll go.”
“You’re staying.”
That makes her look back again. And now there’s something else under the anger, something she’s been holding back for longer than this conversation.
“You don’t actually want me to go…”
“I never wanted you far from me, Mireya,” I replied before looking down at her. “Sit down.”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“I fucking am, Mister Caldwell.”
Not my name…
“I don’t like that, don’t call me that.”
“Is fucking liar Caldwell better?”
I looked at her one last time before grabbing my keys and my phone, “You stay here and rest, I’m a text away if you need anything.”
I don’t leave right away. I’m still in the room and I’m down in front of her the next second. My knees hit the floor and I don’t think about it twice. She doesn’t move, not away, not toward me. My hand goes to her cheek before I can talk myself out of it.
Then I feel it when my fingers slide lower to her neck.
The marks there are faint but enough to make me feel an anger I've never felt before. Something tightens in my chest so hard it almost pulls the air out of me. It’s been so long since I felt so disappointed to not be able to protect someone like that.
So long since I felt a madness as strong as the one I’m feeling right now.
I want to kill that person. I really do.
I don’t say anything for a second because if I do, it’s going to come out wrong. Instead I let my head drop onto her thigh.
I breathe out against her like I’ve been underwater for so long.
“Fuck,” I say quietly. “I was worried.”
I stay there a second longer than I should. Then I push myself up again. My hand goes to the top of her head and my lips follow, leaving a small kiss there with my eyes closed.
I shouldn’t be doing any of this and I shouldn’t feel the way I feel about her either.
“I’ll find him,” I say, “And I’ll kill him.”
I turn before I say anything else that I can’t take back.
I make it to the door, but then she says my name, “Damien.” And I stop immediately, fully tuning.
She’s standing now, and moves toward me.
Her hand catches my shirt before I can say anything.
And then she kisses me. Like she hates that she did.
Like she hates that she still wants this.
The control breaks every time she does something she didn’t mean to do, like her body keeps betraying whatever argument she’s having with herself. And I stop thinking in clean lines. When I finally respond, it’s not careful either.
It’s the same problem she has, too much emotion, nowhere clean to put it.
Her hand in my shirt, tightening without any fear of hurting me, like she’s trying to hold onto something that keeps moving. It turns messy fast.
There’s regret in it somewhere, buried under everything else. I can feel it in the tension of her, when she doesn’t fully lean in or fully pull away, like she’s still arguing with herself even while she’s here. And I understand it. Because I’m doing the same thing.
Letting it happen while knowing I shouldn’t, while knowing that stopping would feel just as wrong now.
When she pulls back, she doesn’t let go of me right away, neither do I move.
“I still fucking hate what you did,” she says and she means it.
Her hand loosens on my shirt, distance starts to come back into her body like she remembers she was supposed to let me exist at a safe distance.
She steps back, one stupid step and I catch her before she can fully decide it. My hand closes around her wrist and pulls her back in and kisses her again. I want more. I missed her… I miss her even when she’s next to me.
Her breath shifts against me when I lean in, this time the kiss isn’t like hers was. It’s slower and heavier.. It’s still an argument, right?
When our tongues meet in a desperate way and nothing about it is soft. I like this argument. It just stops coming out as words, it turns into tongues dancing against each other, air mixing between us, bodies melting against one another.
I savor it all. Her presence, her smell, her life. She’s here, she’s still mine even if she hates me, she’s still my Mireya.
When I pull back, I don’t let go of her completely. My hand is still there for a second too long. I can feel it in her, the anger still there, the betrayal she felt.
“I know,” I say before I let go properly this time.
I step back, and fuck it takes effort. More than it should. She doesn’t move forward again, doesn’t follow, doesn’t stop me either. I turn before I change my mind.
This time I actually leave, the door closes behind me, and I keep walking.