Chapter 3 #3
I just remember being splayed on his bed, wrists and ankles tied down, staring at his ceiling as blood poured from my throat.
I thought I’d die, and still I didn’t scream.
I couldn’t. But I could hear him. His rough pants and his foul words and I needed to claim my silence, to give myself that one reprieve.
I didn’t want to listen to him, to listen to anyone, especially blond boys with big dreams.
Deaf wasn’t a choice; it was fucking survival, letting kids purposefully pound into my ears day after day, year after year.
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—eight years of taunting them, begging them to with my eyes and my aggression since I could no longer speak.
Take him away. Take them all away, I said with my fist in their faces and my fingers around their throats and my back on the concrete of the courtyard, splaying my arms and legs like I was forced to in bed, letting the hits rain down on me until I couldn’t even hear the nest of ravens in the garden anymore.
Take his voice away from me like he took mine.
The sound went out all at once when a fist that finally rivaled mine slammed into my skull.
“Help me and my brother. Please. He’s going to kill us,” a fifteen-year-old Kane said, seconds before his fist hit me again—just like I’d asked him to do so—and I’d never hear his voice again.
Blood trickled from my ears, and for the first time since Viktor told me to dry my eyes that first day, I wept.
Tears fell as Kane kept begging me, his green eyes harboring a pain so deep that I instantly felt safe near him, even as he battered me.
It was the one way we could communicate, and we did it fucking efficiently.
So I punched him back. I laid him flat on his back, his scrawny body at the time eating up the concrete as he slid.
The fight went out of him as he settled, and when I reached down my hand, he took it.
“Thank you,” I managed, my entire body twitching with the pain the words caused, my throat never having fully healed from Viktor’s assault.
I couldn’t hear myself speak anymore, and so the words felt mangled too, like I didn’t understand how to form syllables the same way anymore.
But I didn’t care. It was done. I’d never hear Viktor again.
Never hear my Buyers, those awful fucking women with their long, painted nails and cooing voices.
Or their husbands. Fuck, their husbands.
They liked to share me. Sometimes it was in bed, but even more often it was watching me kill for them.
Kane asked something, his brow furrowed as he let me help him to his feet.
Looking back, I think he was asking if I was deaf, but I didn’t understand so I just gripped his shoulder, looked him dead in the eye, and spoke a final time, a promise I’d keep for the rest of my days after the gift he’d just given me: “Safe.”
I’d never been much of the saving type, but the sob that tore out of Kane was enough to give me stupid hope.
I couldn’t hear it but I felt it in the way his body folded toward me, his forehead dropping to my shoulder.
I let mine fall to his too, neither of us touching in any other way—just resting with each other, acknowledging that maybe that part of our lives had finally reached a conclusion, and when we pulled apart, drying our eyes, two teenage boys who really had nothing except our fists and our guns, it was like we made a pact without speaking.
He had Thorne and I had the girl I had a bad habit of tracking like a damn North Star.
Arden. Big grey eyes and so many freckles and—my only regret—the prettiest fucking laugh I’d never hear again.
Together, Kane and I watched Arden and Thorne choose each other, and you’d think I would’ve been jealous but I wasn’t.
I just liked seeing her light up. There wasn’t a space in that estate that didn’t come alive when Arden was in it.
The only time she was dim was when she was in her Doll dress and paint, but even then she shined brighter than us all.
Even Kane was enamored by her, caught up in the way she and Leah giggled through the house, running around in their ratty clothes and messy braids.
My girl. My girl. She’ll never understand just how many lives she saved, and that is the real fucking tragedy.
Kane and I chose each other after that. A quiet, often violent, but safe collaboration.
Buyers started purchasing us together, and I don’t know if I would’ve made it through it all without him.
I’d promised myself to never give in again to a blond boy with big dreams, but hell, I think if Kane had the ability to smash the world into his favor, it would do so happily.
I grew to love him as a brother, a safety net, and while I didn’t know Thorne as well as I did Kane, I grew to appreciate him too.
I liked that Thorne helped Arden burn brighter and brighter.
It was…addicting…to see how bright she could become, but none of us ever expected her to step into that courtyard that day or for her to look at me like that.
Creed, I thought as she stood there with that rusted pocket knife, and I suddenly knew what it was like to have your heart heal and break and heal, over and over, just from looking at someone else.
Because she saw me. She saw me like Alex had, like Kane did, and eventually, how Thorne did, too.
She saw how calm had ruined me, how remembering was putting me in an early grave.
She knew I was enduring. Silently. Desperately.
And I think some part of her felt the same thing looking at me—escape.
But destruction was always our fate.