50. Eugene
Chapter fifty
Eugene
My phone buzzed somewhere across the room. I ignored it. Then, it buzzed again. By the time the third notification shook the table, I already knew who it was.
Brielle.
She always called. Always cared more than she should… Had the biggest heart in the room, the easiest to love, the hardest to make hurt.
When she married Killian, she married into the family net she’d always dreamed of having. People who showed up and who loved her. People who didn’t disappear into the shadows when life got hard.
On the night of her wedding all those years ago, she kept looking back at me all throughout the reception and the ceremony, like she was afraid I’d slip out the door and never come back.
I almost did.
Crowds, noise, happiness… it was too much… especially when Raymond and Jamie showed their faces for the first time in decades. And with the biggest smile like they hadn’t abandoned us, my little sister took in their empty apologies and lies.
I didn’t.
Because everything good feels like a lie when you grew up waiting for someone, anyone to show up.
Still, I allowed her to tug me into pictures, sticking me in the middle of the wedding party, introducing me to every Russel connection like I wasn’t a loaded gun sitting at their table.
And she tried so hard.
But I always let her down. Even now, after everything she did for me and after everything I didn’t do for her.
Brielle spent the last few years acting like the older sibling. Texting me. Calling, sending food to the warehouse I hid away from the world in, putting me on guest lists, forcing me into family outings, dragging me into her world of love and warmth like maybe it would fix me.
Like she could fix me and undo two decades of shit with a hug.
She built this massive life, with kids, love, traditions, holidays, a husband who’d kill for her… and she still had room left over to worry about me.
I pinched the bridge of my nose as my chest tightened. With guilt? Rage? I could never tell the difference.
Eventually the buzzing stopped.
Good. I didn’t have the energy to pretend tonight.
Pushing off the floor, I rolled out my shoulders, my muscles aching from the push-ups I forced myself through.
Walking over to the edge of the cot I slept on, I pulled on my shirt that I’d thrown on it carelessly a few hours ago, my eyebrows furrowing as I glanced down at my phone buzzing once more.
It was a voicemail. From an unknown number. I didn’t care to listen to it. I’d had my fair share of unknown numbers trying to get in contact with me, from getting rid of every burner I’d owned when army officers started pinpointing my location to Calvin Lockwood keeping tabs on me.
Being under Killian’s watch now, I was a free man, no longer needing to hide my identity from the government for going AWOL after being deployed.
So against my better judgement, I picked up the phone to check it. The second I hit play, I knew I shouldn’t have. But the sound of her voice filled the silence of the warehouse so loud, I almost felt paralyzed.
The message played—
“Hi, Lovebug…”
—and my entire body froze. My breath punched out of my chest in one violent exhale. The warehouse blurred. My knees threatened to give out, but I refused to let them.
“It’s been a while,” she continued, my heart lurching out of my chest, my mind racing at the sound of her voice, now older… softer… but unmistakably hers.
She kept talking. I knew she did—her voice moved, kept shaping words, but I wasn’t hearing them anymore. I had no idea what she said after those first two sentences.
My brain didn’t let me have it.
Everything inside me was roaring.
My pulse drowned her out. My mind split open like an old wound, vision tunneled, ears ringing. Her voice warped into something I couldn’t hold onto, couldn’t process, couldn’t let myself hear.
And then… the voicemail clicked off and silence filled the room.
I stared at the phone like it might explode, scared her voice would crawl out of the speaker and choke me all over again.
And something inside me snapped. The phone flew out of my hand before I even realized I’d thrown it. It smashed against the concrete, skidding into the shadows, pieces scattering.
“Fuck!”
The shout ricocheted off metal beams and empty walls. I pressed both palms to my face, trying to breathe through the shaking in my chest, trying to shove down the storm ripping through me.
It was easier when she was a memory and I could pretend she hadn’t chosen a life over her children… over us. It was easier when she was dead. And she was fucking dead to me.
But now—
Now she was calling me as if she still had the fucking right.
Like she remembered I existed and finally wanted me. But I wanted nothing, absolutely nothing to do with her.
I braced both hands on my knees, gasping for a breath that wouldn’t come, vision blurring in and out, my head pounding, my eyes growing heavy as my chest stayed tight.
A shadow cast over me, army boots coming into my line of sight as the figure stood watching silently.
I ignored it as I turned my face away, slapping my cheek hard enough to sting, anything to keep myself tethered.
He isn’t real.
He isn’t real.
He isn’t fucking real.
His voice flickered behind me, just a whisper, another hallucination, my trauma playing its favorite game. But I didn’t look at him. “You know she didn’t mean to leave.”
A tremor rolled down my spine. I squeezed my eyes shut. No. Not tonight. Not fucking tonight.
My breath came too fast, too shallow.
“Shut up,” I muttered to the empty air, my eyes searching immediately for the pills I’d been prescribed. I couldn’t find them.
But he kept talking anyway; he always did. Because my head was a torture house of buried corpses and old guilt that never decomposed.
“You know she didn’t mean it,” he murmured. “She loves you, man. She always did.”
My jaw clenched until it hurt, my hands rummaging through my desk drawers as he followed me. Why couldn’t I fucking find them?
“Shut up.”
“She came back,” he went on softly. “And you survived. We both did—”
Finally they came into sight and I ripped open the cap, forcing the dry tablets down my throat. “You. Didn’t.” The words ripped out of me. “You fucking didn’t.”
Silence followed and my breathing filled the air, my heartbeat ringing in my ears. “I didn’t save you,” I whispered. “I didn’t save any of us.”
Then, mercifully, the mental weight of my mind lifted and he was gone.
I sagged forward, forearms braced on my desk, body shaking as relief and grief twisted together inside me before I collapsed to the ground, pills spilling beside me.
I lay on my back, hand finding my forehead as I forced myself to breathe.
This was why Brielle worried.
Why she hovered so close and why Killian kept me on a leash made of patience and caution.
Because I was a cracked mirror pretending not to be shattered—and God… I hated being broken.