49 #4
Well. My words clearly did not have the effect I had hoped for.
“Her father.”
The world stills.
Tilts.
My blood runs hot.
Cold.
I feel everything.
Nothing.
What did he say?
Very slowly, in the deathly silence that has followed his claim, I turn my head to Cooper, and I repeat the question aloud, “What did you say?”
Extremely stupidly, with no sense of self-preservation whatsoever, he does not back down, and replies just as lowly as my own words, “Your. Father. He gave you that scar, didn’t he? He’s the one who hurts you. He’s the one who had the Avri put in your face. And he’s the one the Avri belongs to.”
Breathing harshly, I am panting, heaving, a cobra ready to strike. And he is not heeding the warning signs.
“W-what?” Alby’s quiet, horrified voice is Cooper’s only saving grace.
“What’s he talking about? How do you know that?” That is Tiger, but everything sounds mildly hazy: the trembling in his voice, the lack of any of his usual happiness, all muffled.
Now is not the fucking time for my mind to shut down—I have to do damage control.
“You figured out who’s causing Havoc’s agony and you didn’t tell us?!”
“Everyone calm down—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Scotty—”
“It’s fucking obvious! And excuse me for not wanting to discuss that with you when it’s Vengeance’s business!
Her fucking trauma! I’m an asshole but not that much of one!
I know what it’s like to have the story of your abuse thrown about, to have yourself talked about like you’re nothing but a pity case! ”
Sound pops back clearly like a bubble bursting.
“We wouldn’t throw it around, you bastard! And no one sees her like that—”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“Ezla, Love, are you alright? Is it true?” Scotty’s gentle voice that interrupts their argument cannot control the unsteadiness in it, the fracturing of his composure at Cooper’s revelation and its possible truthfulness.
I open my mouth after getting my weave of lies straight, but Cooper beats me to it .
. . except with nothing but the disgraceful, shameful truth he has uncovered: “It’s her father who’s been doing all of this!
” His head swivels back to me. “I bet he beats you often, doesn’t he?
Along with the fucking shit he’s clearly doing with the Avri!
” He does not wait for my denial before he continues venomously, “He’s the source of that fucking agony we all get bursts of.
He sliced his own daughter’s face, and he made you wear that bloody helmet to hide it!
To hide the fact he went further and chose to scar it, to showcase it with his own Avri like some perverted claim of ownership!
And I’m betting on everything that a part of his cluster has direct control over it so he can cause pain whenever he feels like it!
That part I only just fucking figured out, because this horror story never fucking ends, does it?
! So who’s to say there’s not even more?
” Bile climbs up my throat, and I do not know why I simply sit here, numbly, pathetically, not even defending myself.
“What else does he do to you, huh? Huh?!”
“Cooper, that’s enough,” Scotty warns, but his voice is hoarse, and I know he and the others are all listening to his words, absorbing them, assessing their validity.
Cooper leans closer, shoving Scotty’s hand away that had pressed to his chest to ward him off me. I glare at him more maliciously than ever before, more malevolence pouring off of me than I have ever given anyone besides the man he currently speaks of.
He glares right back, though his is mostly aimed at my father, I know, not me. Even if he is so obviously sick of my lies.
Grabbing the back of my neck with one hand and my head in the other, he drags me closer, our faces pausing merely centimetres apart. “Am. I. Wrong?”
Through my gnashing teeth, my harsh breaths are more like the hisses of a poisonous snake preparing to unleash her venom.
His voice drops to a low, lethal whisper. “Am. I. Wrong?”
But I cannot speak. For once, I do not have a web of effective responses to avert attention from the topic at hand. For once, I cannot find my defences.
Cooper has been the biggest problem here this entire time: I have known he was figuring things out, and I’d had to be very, very careful around him especially.
With the past I have caught glimpses of in his mind when he thinks about it, I have known exactly how alike we are in some aspects.
Yet I turned out way worse than him, way more cruel and vicious and volatile.
I grew to love violence, while he only loathed it.
I understand him better than most others could, but that has always meant he could understand me in the same way.
I hate him for it.
I want him for it.
The air thickens, thrumming with a new kind of tension, a new kind of heat I had never felt before him or my other Bonded.
His eyes drop to my lips.
His breathing as ragged and rapid as mine, I only catch a glimpse of his before they slam onto my own.