17. Ellie
Ellie
Time becomes nothing more than shattered glass in a kaleidoscope for me, and each piece I manage to grasp before it slips away reflects something different.
A hand on my forehead.
A thermometer beeping.
The bitter taste of a pill dissolving on my tongue.
And, more often than anything else, the weight of a soft, warm blanket being tucked around shoulders that won't stop shaking.
I'm aware of them in pieces, too.
Jinx's coconut shampoo and the low murmur of his voice reading to me in the quiet, even though the words themselves never settle fully into my brain. The cool press of a damp cloth against my forehead. His fingers finding the knots in my hair and working through them, untangling and re-braiding it.
Cyrus exists to me in nothing but beeps and numbers.
A blood pressure cuff tightening and releasing around my upper arm.
The scratch of a pen on paper. His voice, low and steady, reading the metrics that tell him I'm still alive even if I feel like a thousand tiny teeth are gnashing me apart.
The lenses of his glasses catching so much light every time he leans over me, I can't even see his eyes.
Tank is the hardest to track because he moves in absolute silence despite being built like his namesake.
I know he's there by the shift in energy when he isn't here, which is rare.
He keeps his distance from me, like he's afraid I'll break if he touches me.
When I manage to crack an eye open, he's always just sitting there in the corner by the bed, a shadow in the dark.
Sometimes he's on the carpet. Usually sitting, sometimes stretched out next to the bed on his side, head on the floor, so big I could reach his shoulder if I managed to move my hand more than an inch across the mattress.
But sometimes he rests his hand on the corner of the mattress.
When I roll toward the edge of the mattress during one of the bad spells, his fingers ghost beneath my shoulder before I fully tip, correcting my trajectory with such minimal force, I barely feel it.
Like he thinks I'm made of paper, and one wrong fold will tear me in half.
I'm not glass, I want to tell him, even if I feel like shards of it are burrowing beneath my skin, but my mouth won't cooperate and besides, maybe he's right.
Maybe I am fragile right now.
The pills were the only thing holding the pieces together and without them I'm just pieces.
Nothing more than shards and empty spaces where a person used to be.
The fever climbs and the room warps. The walls breathe in and out, expanding and contracting with my lungs, and the pink paint melts. I try to count the photo strips on the wall, but they keep multiplying, splitting into copies of themselves until I can't tell which ones are real anymore.
Five is supposed to be the number that makes the world hold still, but it's all melding together, every object and surface and color in my room.
How the fuck am I supposed to count when none of it will hold still?
Then someone's hand closes around my wrist. Checking my pulse or holding me down, I can't tell, and the not-knowing makes me panic.
There's a voice.
It's muffled and faraway, like it's underwater, but I know it's Cyrus because it's definitely not Jinx, and Tank can't speak.
He sounds so composed, and I hate him for it.
I hate all of them for doing this to me, for making me fall apart when I need it, I need those fucking pills to keep every jagged little piece of me from shattering until I can't be put back together again.
The most tolerable this fresh hell ever gets is right after they give me the substitute pills, and this time, I'm so out of it someone has to put it on the back of my tongue and massage my throat to make me swallow.
That must be Jinx. The hand on my throat is perfectly smooth and soft.
The relief that follows the pills, however brief and insufficient, gives me something to compare it to and knowing what's coming when it wears off makes everything so much fucking worse in contrast.
But the worst part of all is the stillness that comes after. The quiet void my brain always fills with things I'd rather not see.
It's Kade's shift.
I know it's his because I hear that motherfucking lighter clicking. I want to rip it out of his hands and set his sweatshirt on fire.
I'm somewhere between awake and not. The fever has receded enough that I feel the sheets against my skin again, can distinguish the ceiling from the walls and locate myself in space and time even if both still feel like fuzzy concepts rather than solid, definable things.
My eyes are closed but I'm not sleeping. I haven't actually slept properly in… I don't know. Days, maybe.
This can't last for weeks.
Can it?
Every time I start to drift, my body rebels, yanking me back with a jolt of adrenaline that serves no purpose except to remind me that my nervous system no longer trusts itself.
Click.
I drift.
Click.
Deeper.
The mansion is different tonight.
I'm back here, somehow.
When the fuck did I get here?
The servants have all gone home early and it's quiet, which means Todd has plans and Todd's plans are never fucking good.
A scream tears from the kitchen.
Or at least, that's what I call that sound even though scream doesn't feel like enough to describe it. It's immediately followed by the thunk of a body hitting a hard object.
I'm running before I decide to run. Bare feet on marble, the cold shooting up through my soles, and the kitchen door is right there but it might as well be a hundred fucking yards away because I see them.
Todd has my mother by the hair.
A fistful of it, wrenched back so her throat is exposed, and he's dragging her across the tile like she's a bag of garbage he's taking to the curb.
Her hands claw at his wrist but she's too weak from the pills to really fight him.
Always those fucking pills, eating away at her strength until she can't even defend herself.
Not that there would be any real defending herself against a man twice her size. I guess that's why she'd rather numb out. If you're going to be hit anyway, you might as well make it hurt less.
Her robe is torn. One slipper is gone, left somewhere in the hallway.
Her face is a mess of mascara and tears but her face has that blank look that means she's already checked out, already retreated to whatever corner of her mind she goes when reality becomes unbearable.
She wore that look a lot in the early days after we moved out of the apartment Dad sometimes shared with us, when he wasn't busy with his real family.
"Mom—"
Todd looks up, cold blue eyes finding me in the doorway without surprise. He looks at me the same way he always looks at me, like I'm an inconvenience, a little fly he'll swat when he's finished with the current task.
"Go back to your room, Eleanor. This doesn't concern you."
I'm not going back to my fucking room.
The knife block on the counter is within reach.
Butcher, bread, paring, chef.
So many ways to gut a pig.
My hand finds the largest handle and the blade whispers free. It feels good in my grip. Good and heavy. I see the way Todd's eyes widen and for once, I feel strong.
"Let go of her."
My voice doesn't shake. I'm surprised by that. Everything else is shaking—my hands, my knees, the world itself—but my voice itself comes out flat and certain.
Todd lets go of my mother's hair, but several clumps of gold stick between his fingers. She flops to the tile like a ragdoll, and he straightens, and he looks at me with the knife in my hand and the shock in his eyes turns into a far more Todd-like emotion.
Amusement.
"Put that down before you get hurt, little girl."
"Not until you get away from her."
He moves so fucking fast.
That's the thing about men like Todd. They look perfectly composed and domesticated with their designer suits, but underneath they're still predators as much as some creep on the corner with a gun.
His hand closes around my wrist and twists.
The pain is blinding, my fingers spasming open before my brain can override them. The knife clatters to the tile and I barely have time to scream before his other hand wraps around my throat.
My head hits the wall. Bursts of light and color fill my eyes. Mom is screaming my name, but it sounds like it's coming from far away.
"You want to play with knives, Eleanor?" His voice is still so fucking calm, the senator's voice that gives speeches about family values and community safety when he's the very kind of monster mothers need to hide their daughters from at night.
"Let me show you what happens to little girls who play with things they can't handle. "
The hand tightens.
"Stop it!" Mom pleads. "Don't touch her!"
She's still on the floor behind him but closer, eyes half-open, watching but not moving. The pills have made her a ghost and ghosts can't save anyone, they can only haunt the world as it moves around them.
Air becomes a luxury first, then a memory. My fingers claw at his hands, at the fingers crushing my windpipe, as my vision goes dark around the edges.
"Todd, you're killing her!"
I'm still clawing, thrashing against the darkness, my nails finding skin and digging in deep enough to draw blood.
My hands are weapons, tearing at whatever flesh I can find, raking lines across a jaw, a neck, a chest because if I'm going out, I will take every fucking piece of him I can bring with me.
"DON'T!" My voice comes out shredded. "I'LL KILL YOU. I SWEAR TO GOD I'LL KILL YOU, GET OFF ME!"
Hands catch my wrists. Both of them, firmly but not with the crushing, vicious pressure of Todd's grip.
"Ellie. Ellie. It's me. Look at me."
The voice is the wrong pitch and cadence, but…
"Princess. Open your eyes."
My eyes are open. Have been open this whole time, but seeing a different room, a different set of hands. The world reassembles itself around me bit by bit, first with the pink walls replacing the cold white marble.
And then Kade's face above mine, blood welling in three parallel scratches down the left side of his jaw, those gray eyes wide with an emotion I've only seen in them a handful of times before.
Fear.
Fear for me.