Chapter Ten
Smoke burned out the front of the car I had stolen in a whirlwind of gray. Or borrowed, I guess, seeing as I had the keys and permission to drive from the previous owner. Not that legal things bothered me so much, but I didn’t want to lie in the last few minutes of my life.
The front of the car was crushed, the bumper ruined. Bits of glass and metal crunched on the drive of my home as I groaned and did my best not to pass out. Again. I’d gone unconscious at least twice on my drive home. The first time had been for a second at best, and I’d only clipped a streetlight. It was fine and Yumi had even laughed in the passenger seat beside me as she stared around at her new freedom with an excitement that I wished I could muster up.
The next time my world had turned black had been moments ago, as I came across my driveway and damn near burst into tears. That bout of darkness hadn’t been as easy – I’d been out for at least five seconds; long enough for me to crash into the gate, ruining the car and breaking my locks. Yumi had woken me up a little shocked, but altogether okay. She’d even laughed again, like she couldn’t believe it.
It was fine. So fucking what? We were here.
A dead girl didn’t need locks on her house. A dead girl didn’t need shit. And I was going to be dead as soon as I made sure the little girl was safe.
“Your house?” Yumi helped drag me out of the car, my eyes blurring, body far too heavy, even as I stubbornly refused to drop the prize in my grip that had been brought from my dungeon.
“Yes.” Speaking was an effort I could barely manage, but I wanted to make sure the poor kid knew I hadn’t kidnapped her again.
That’s how she had ended up in that house.
On the short drive home, I had explained as best as I could who I was and where we were going. In return the crying voice in the walls had turned around and tried her best to let me know she was fourteen in the fall, had been born in a village too far away and too poor, and had been taken the same night her family were slaughtered about a year ago. She’d skimmed over it but she had three brothers, her parents and grandparents.
All were dead.
She’d bounced around safe houses until she’d wound up at the one we’d just escaped to be sold off to a nearby owner. She’d been damaged beyond repair, the same way all the others like her I had found recently in that other house, just like the one we’d left and where I had found Delilah.
“Doctor in your home?” Yumi double-checked my information as she helped me walk.
“Retta.” I whispered the name as we hobbled up my driveway, the object in my free hand still clenched tight. “And another lady called Nessa. Both of them are doctors and they are sweet – they will be nice to you.”
Yumi had said she was okay. She had cuts that had healed, bruises that would fade, and was hungry and thirsty as hell. She said all her injuries were in her brain, like me. But she insisted she was okay now. She said she’d killed the man who’d hurt her the most in that house. The one who had laughed and called her all sorts of nasty things as he did wicked stuff to a little girl who had deserved better.
She’d laughed as she stabbed him to death and repeated his words back to him and now she claimed that had made her fixed enough she wouldn’t die.
All she wanted was a shower, food, and a real outfit. That was it.
God, I hoped it helped her. I hoped the memory of her monster’s death made her feel better one day because it sure as fuck wouldn’t be easy to feel better. I doubted I could, and I hadn’t even had it as bad as her – nobody but my stalker had touched me, and even then it wasn’t sexual. It was just with pain.
Lots and lots of pain and drugs and water shoved into my lungs until I was sure they were permanently damaged. Cuts on my skin, burns sometimes too. Nothing I hadn’t gone through before. Nothing that wouldn’t have healed with time.
The only part of me that was broken was my brain.
“Doctors good. You need doctor, not me – you look dead.” Yumi nodded her head, looking the tiniest bit relieved when the lights from beside my front door came into view.
“I’m fine.” It was a lie, but it felt like I had to say it, anyway.
“You are dead.” She shook her head and repeated herself as she eyed up all the blood that gushed out of me in far too many places, and I used her as a crutch as I continued to silently count the steps toward my house.
I had counted to a thousand far too many times. Each step had felt like I was burning inside and yet I couldn’t stop. I happily embraced the fire because I knew I was heading home – I was going back to the place that was my own. The one my daddy built for me to be safe in. And I was going to sit there with nothing but his bones and the memories of what I had lost and what I had done.
I would sit there until the sun rose and Yumi was safe, then I would take whatever gun I could find and blow my worthless fucking brains out. That’s what I would do. That was how I could fix the things inside of me that were no longer right.
The door was locked when we reached it, but it was nothing my handprint didn’t fix – nobody had used all the extra locks, like the key too.
“Come inside.” I let Yumi half-drag me into my foyer as the tears that streamed down my cheeks almost burned and we checked out the house for people.
I still refused to drop what I held, even if it would have been easier.
There was nobody in the dining room. Nobody in the kitchen. Nobody in the lounge. There would not be anyone in my house again. The men I had brought there were dead. The ones who had once roamed the halls of the Leroux household and then my own were dead. Everyone I loved around me was dead because my touch was a poison that I had offered out without thought, despite knowing the consequences.
If my daddy had known the real depravity of my soul, he would not have called me an angel. He would have called me a sinner – the worst kind of one. He would have made me beg his God for penance and redemption. He probably would have denounced me as pure evil. Because only evil could do what I had done. Only evil could have torn apart flesh with her hands and commit such… such violence with her father’s body and against her mother.
My skin was stained with blood that would wash away, but I knew it would never truly leave. It had seeped into my soul and there was only one solution to such a thing.
One solution to me no longer being alone.
With my single free hand, I grabbed a bottle of vodka off the kitchen counter when we stopped there, swigging a few mouthfuls as I ordered Yumi to devour the contents of the fridge until she was full and no longer thirsty. She’d done as she was told, and the minute she was finished, I would offer her a shower and find out where the fuck all my doctors had gone and why the house was so fucking quiet.
Then I would put my gift on something pretty, like a trophy stand for Beau or someone to eventually find.
“You need food.” Yumi tried to hand me half of a haphazard sandwich she had made, and though I tried to refuse, I didn’t do so for long.
I’d eaten the damn thing in three bites, eagerly watching her as she went to make another. It had been cheese, tomato, pickles and some ranch. A nasty combination for me and yet I hadn’t cared in the slightest. I was covered in blood and gore and grossness. Who cared if I didn’t enjoy the taste of the first proper food I’d had in far too long? Who cared if it was a weird as fuck combination of things that I didn’t think went together?
Who cared if I felt like I wanted to throw it all back up again before I bled to death on the kitchen floor?
“Feed yourself first, I-” There was a snort of laughter outside, and I instantly froze, body going stiff.
The only reason I knew it was real and not in my head was because Yumi heard it too and I recognized it.
I knew that laugh – I knew the man with the bright blue eyes, dark hair and ridiculous tattoos that coated his pretty, pale skin. The skin that had covered his delicious muscles that were one of the many strong things about him. The strong things like the way he hugged you every time, as though it was the last time he would see you and he wanted to imprint you to his body.
The laugh of a man I loved and thought was dead.
With my free hand, I grabbed a knife from the stand on the side and put a finger to my lips, trying not to accidentally stab myself in the face as I did. “Stay here.” My voice was rough, and each word sounded funny. But my grip on my gift was still strong and unwavering, and the knife was sturdy enough not to fall.
Yumi nodded, continuing with her second sandwich eating and making a third, as I carefully padded to the shut backdoors, pretending that each step didn’t make me want to throw up, or that I knew I was one second shy from passing the fuck out.
My heart was racing in my chest, but not in a fun way.
In the sort of way that hurt.
With a trembling hand, I slowly pushed open the backdoors, doing my best to be silent and calm. Like I wasn’t dying and scared and the tiniest bit hopeful that maybe, just maybe, things weren’t so bad now that I was home again. Maybe at least one of the men I loved had survived, which meant there might have been hope for the others – for all of them…
Two steps into the early morning light were all I needed to take before my thoughts were confirmed in a blissfully terrifying moment. The kind of moment where my heart pounded a little too hard, the blood that had left my body stopped being a minor problem, and the pain in my bones was enough to make me want to kneel.
I saw them outside. Talking and plotting, and working on Misha’s giant whiteboard. I saw my uncle, Ruby, and Widow and the others, too. I saw all of my men – every single one, even a shirtless and slightly bandaged Kody.
Alive.
They were all alive. They hadn’t left me. They were there and considering Yumi had disobeyed my orders and followed me; I knew they were real.
“Friends?” She whispered from behind me, but I couldn’t answer.
I didn’t know if I made a noise or if the darkness in my soul tainted the air. Either way, Beau’s head lifted as he reached to the little table beside his chair for a drink, and his eyes innocently glanced our way. I watched as he shuddered; his body jolting like he’d just been electrocuted. I watched as the drink in his hand shattered against the ground when the glass slipped through his fingers. I watched as his mouth widened and his eyes were blown wide and he jumped to his feet.
He had the expression of a man seeing a miracle and it was rather nice to witness, even if I knew I would not last longer than a moment more.
“Sapphire.” He choked on my name as the world around me tilted on its axis, taking me with it.
With a gurgling laugh, as blood felt like it flooded my lungs and my heart raced even faster, I let the lump in my hand fall, squelching against the patio with a sickening sort of echo I knew I would forever hear.
“I bought you a present, tío.” I wheezed.
Elaina’s head rolled a little until it hit the grass. Then it just stopped and stayed there, watching me. Everyone was watching me. Even the dead men I loved. But instead of doing anything remotely normal, or responding to Yumi who asked if I was okay as she grabbed my arm, I stared into my dead mother’s eyes and laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed and knew that there was no going back now.
I was a sinner, and I was happy to be one. I was glad I was one.
I was glad to have hacked Elaina’s screaming head off with my father’s broken bone in her flesh until she was nothing but a pile of future bones that would never harm anyone again.
If darkness was evil, then consider me the depths of hell itself, because I would never be returning to the light. I wouldn’t be doing anything for a while as my body finally gave up, my heart reached the culmination of its beats, and Yumi didn’t have the strength to hold me up entirely as I hit the floor.
There was so much noise around me for a while after that. So many voices and words and nonsense I couldn’t make out. But none of it mattered because I had fucking won – I had won and I saw…. I saw the best thing ever.
Beau. His eyes. His smile. His concern. I fucking saw him and it wasn’t just him for a moment. My daddy was there. In the way he stared at me with too much love. In the way his lips pulled into a frown. In the way the tears streamed down his cheeks and he fucking said my name like a man at worship, talking to something he didn’t think he deserved or could ever live without.
I hadn’t lost my daddy. He was right there. He was reaching out to me and begging and crying and… and he was there for me. He was trying to save me.
He wasn’t gone.
“No,”Beau was on his knees, holding me, touching me all over as he checked for injuries and yelled to the others that I needed a doctor, or maybe something else. “Please stay with me, baby girl. Please don’t let me lose you again.”
I’d missed hearing him speak Spanish with his slightly Russian accent. I missed the way I could hear the words he slightly pronounced wrong. I missed the way he looked at me, like I was one of the most important people in the world.
Tears streamed down his cheeks, his eyes burned with a thousand dark thoughts, and despite it all, I wanted to comfort him. I wanted him to know just what I needed him to do – what I had fought for but failed at.
I wanted him to know the truth before death took me.
“I’m sorry for how I was made.”My lips parted, and I whispered as I fell into the darkness.
I knew it was before my men reached me that I left whatever sanity and soul I had left on the grounds of my home. I knew that as they reached me, yelling and cursing and far more upset than I would have ever wanted them to be, that despite my current situation, I was happy. I had made it home – I had saved myself. And those I loved were with me. I had even saved Yumi too; a complete stranger of a child who had shared food, water, and strength with me.
Whose sobbing presence so close yet so far had been one of the few things to keep the last shred of sanity in my brain the entire time I had been gone.
The crying in the walls had been the only noise other than my own agony and I had latched onto that.
I had latched onto her. And she was safe.
“Sapphire, please.”Beau begged me again, but I couldn’t reply, and I didn’t care.
I didn’t care that I died because I had got that one last look at someone I loved, that I so desperately needed. The one I had fought for with my life and soul and sanity.
For once in my life, I had won. I had won and the devil could go and fuck himself because I was coming for his throne next.