Chapter Thirty-One The Reckoning
Briar
Go od and Evil.
An early concept that many try to say have a certain likeness.
They like to tell you that good encompasses all the light. It’s the halo of life that does no wrong. It’s the sound of newborn babies crying, soft strands of woven gold hair, and church pews on Sunday.
While evil is the root of sin. It’s the creatures that lurk in the night, screams from the misty woods, and crows squawking over fresh meat. Evil has an image. It is the shade, black, oblivion.
Your whole life they depict these for you, so that when you develop a mind of your own you will be able to see the difference. You will see someone and know whether their intentions are sinister or pure.
They are fucking wrong.
Evil has no fixed image and neither does good.
If that were the case, Alistair wouldn’t be breaking through the door of his family home ready to tear through hell. Dorian wouldn’t have me tethered to a chair with a gag in my mouth, looming over with wicked intent.
By the world’s standard, the man almost holding a PhD, the homecoming king, light brown eyes, million-dollar smile, and well-dressed stature should be my knight in shining armor.
And the morally gray brother, the one with cold eyes, a damning reputation who believes killing people will avenge his friend’s girl is the crooked villain ready to rob me of my innocence.
The moment I’d stepped foot into Hollow Heights. The second I heard about Alistair, he had been painted as the evil one. I was guilty of it myself as he stood beside Easton in that classroom.
I took what they said about him and made assumptions.
Granted, anyone in their right mind would think of him as the bad guy after watching him participate in a murder.
And maybe that did make him evil. The ability to wipe someone off the face of the earth.
At the same time, had someone killed my mom, like Lyra’s, I wasn’t so sure I wouldn’t do the exact same thing.
This entire town had made him into something he wasn’t. They started a war within his soul and expected him to find peace. Shocked when he chose violence over harmony.
Raised by a family that he had no chance of surviving unless he became cruel.
My eyes said words my mouth couldn’t as Alistair came into view, stalking into the living room with animosity in his harsh glare.
I thought his white t-shirt would melt off his body, the way it spread across his defined shoulders, and tapped into his lean waist. His hair wasn’t pushed out of his face, instead single pieces crossed his forehead as if he’d been running his fingers through it.
His boots thudded across the floor.
Dorian barely moved from his seat, swirling the melting ice in the whiskey tumbler, looking up at his younger brother with contempt. The barrel of the gun, resting against the leather chair.
“I was starting to think you wouldn’t show up.” Dorian speaks first, watching the way Alistair abruptly stops as he sees the gun in his hand. He stood in front of us, his eyes flicking to me and back to his brother.
I know the swelling on my eye has started to show, the blood had stopped running down my face an hour ago and I could feel how stiff my eyebrow was from the caked blood that sat there.
Refusing to let him touch me warranted a pistol whip to the face that left me unconscious for what felt like days but had really only been a few hours. When I woke up I was tied to this chair, listening to Dorian rant on and on about how mistaken I was.
How stupid I was for choosing Alistair over him, for denying him when he was better in every way. How appalled he was by my inability to see that for myself. He paced back and forth in front of me, until he’d finally decided to sit down, leading me to believe he’d had some sort of psychotic break.
He had to have.
“What are you doing?” Alistair questions, fists balled by his side as he keeps his cool, knowing he’s at a disadvantage because of the explosive weapon.
“Doing what I do best, little brother.” I don’t have to look over to see the grin on his face, “Taking what’s yours. Taking what has always been mine.”
My mouth ached from straining around this cloth wrapped around my head, preventing me from speaking anything other than disgruntled mumbles. Tears stung my eyes and even though I had tried to remain as calm as possible, I felt their hot slickness run down my cheeks.
“You’re fucking delusion, Dorian. We aren’t kids anymore and this isn’t a game. Let her go.” Alistair argues.
I feel Dorian’s eyes on me, “She’s pretty, isn’t she?
” He murmurs and I want to vomit at the thoughts he’s having about me in his head.
“It was one of the first things I noticed about her. How her cupids bow is perfectly symmetrical and her eyes, they shine like jewels. Then she had to go and ruin it.”
The creak of leather bowing beneath his weight echoes in the room as he stands up, leaving the whiskey on the side table and keeping the gun in his dominant hand. My heart beats in tune with his steps as he waltzes behind my chair.
I can feel the cold metal of the gun pressed into my hair, the way he draws patterns in my scalp with the barrel, making me wince with fear. I tried to suck in the tears, to silence the cries but I could only handle so much.
I couldn’t believe that this was where I might die. Pinned between a man I care about and the man who hates him.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I saw you two in the conservatory the other night. When you thought no one was watching.” Delusional rage spews from his mouth, I can feel the gun shaking in my hair from the force of his voice, “When she let you touch her! Let you defile her. How her body molded against yours and I couldn’t believe she’d do something like that.
I couldn’t believe she’d choose you. I mean,” He scoffs, “If she looks that good with the copy imagine how stunning she’d look beside the original. ”
He had taken a night that I wanted to be special and turned it into something sinister. I’d never be able to think of Alistair’s birthday without thinking about where Dorian had stood when he watched us. How long he’d stayed there.
“She’s not mine.” Alistair says, refusing to make eye contact with me, “She’s just a girl. You’d be ruining your life, your legacy, for a girl that means nothing to me.”
I grimace from his words, pulling my eyes from him to look at the ground. My chest aching so fiercely because I might die meaning nothing to someone who means more to me then he was supposed to.
“She was mine first!” Dorian bellows, my spine shaking from fear. “I saw her first! She was supposed to be mine and you took her from me!”
I wasn’t sure if the confusion was coming from the concussion I was sure I had or the words coming from his mouth.
I could feel his hand press into the side of my head, crying out slightly as he dropped his head to my hair and inhaled deeply, “I saw her on her very first day in Hollow Heights,” He mutters, like he’s talking to me, “I knew at that moment, I had to have her. I had to have you, Briar.”
All I heard was him raising the gun, the sound of it smacking against something solid over and over again as he continued, “But you chose him! You opened up your legs for my extra! He is nothing compared to me!”
This fantasy he had built in his head of us had quickly come falling down without my realization. Only having talked to him twice, I never knew he was watching me. Fueling hallucinations I wanted no part of.
My first day when I felt someone staring, it had been him. Pins and needles poked my skin thinking about all the times I felt someone looking at me and how I had assumed it was Alistair.
The gun is returned to the side of my head, the force of the barrel digging into my skin and I can feel my body trembling. My heart thumping. Sweat trickling my forehead.
“Dorian—” Alistair starts.
“I see the way you look at her! Like she belongs to you! The tattoo on her finger! You marked her!” He practically screams, “You don’t deserve her, you deserve nothing. You’re just a gutter rat, the backup in case I failed. You don’t get to have anything!”
The temperature raises as his movements become more frantic. The countdown on the bomb that is Dorian Caldwell ticking down closer to a massive explosion.
“Dorian! Listen to me,” He steps forward, hand out in a truce, “We can get you help. You don’t need to do this.”
“I don’t need fucking help! I want her!” I flinch, “And if I can’t have her, neither can you.”
It had all been moving so fast, heated words, rushed movements.
Everything was spinning on fast forward and it was then that it all decided to slowed down.
It felt like I’d dropped beneath the surface of the pool, falling to the bottom and just sitting in the depths. Everything in the water was slower.
I watched Alistair charge forward, the word “No” screaming from his lips.
A gust of breath escaped my mouth in slow motion, shutting my eyes before the end came tumbling towards me.
I thought I would have flashes of my future, of my past, all the things I’d never experience, but instead I just saw him. I saw him and conceived a world where I could love him without repercussions.
The way he lunged for me, how fear and pain blossomed across his face like a freshly grown rose. A rose bloomed just before the cold winter, where it would soon die. I wondered if after my death he’d become like Silas or if I really was just nothing to him.
I saw how he’d been a boy before he was lesson, before he’d been painted as the face of evil. I saw what they all had forgotten, that he was loyal, made of flesh and blood, of crooked grins and onyx eyes.
Beneath it all, a boy with dreams, with friends, who laughed.
A boy who had once loved his brother.
And I thought how lucky I was in that moment, to see him as nothing but a boy.