Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
Masin
MAGNOLIA
Iwas sobbing, screaming at Dahes to bring him back. I barely saw his reflection in the river before he was gone, barely got to take in the face I grew up with through the foam in the water, but it was enough that I couldn’t deny it.
Masin was dead.
My little brother was dead.
I went through hell so he could have a better life, so he could live. I became Dahes’ slave. I made my deal in order to bring him back.
I kept reliving the last time I saw him in that river, the first time he died. It was my constant nightmare since coming here.
I was fifteen, Masin was thirteen. Only thirteen years old and he was taken from me.
I took out a piece of bread by the river, and it was stupid.
So fucking stupid. I should have known better, should have waited to give Masin the food until we were well past the bridges.
But he was on the brink of passing out. I didn’t think he’d make it to the northern shore to eat. He was so weak, so starved, so cold—
I gave him a small bite, thinking it’d give him the energy to make it the rest of the way to the ocean. But it was a mistake. Masin wasn’t coherent enough to eat. He started choking, and someone saw us, immediately coming after me.
The guy attacked me with a knife. I tried to fight him off—Masin needed the food—but I wasn’t strong enough.
I wasn’t paying attention to what my brother was doing.
I was so focused on making sure he’d get a proper meal that I hadn’t seen him jump on top of the guy, hadn’t seen his body get shoved into the river as he stopped the knife from slitting my throat.
It should have been me that died.
I’d never screamed so much in my life, never cried so much. I fell to my knees, completely forgetting about the moldy bread as the guy ran off with it, leaving me without the only thing that ever truly mattered.
Masin and I had been alone our entire lives. We never knew our parents, but we always had each other.
Only seconds passed while I was sobbing and pleading by the riverbank when Dahes found me. I made my deal without even thinking, without even looking up from the water to see that it was the devil standing before me.
If he could bring Masin back to life, I’d do anything…
And I did. I spent the past seven years destroying myself, slowly killing my soul, but what got me through was knowing that my little brother was alive somewhere on the streets.
Except now he was dead. It was all for nothing.
I fell to my knees now, screaming just as loudly as I had been back then, begging for Masin to come back. My vision and mind were playing tricks on me, and I couldn’t tell the present from the past. It didn’t matter, my brother was dead in both realities.
I might have registered Dahes laughing. I might have registered Hael cursing and trying to attack him through his chains, even though he shouldn’t. He shouldn’t feel anything toward me anymore, not after what I did to him.
But I was too empty to care. Even if my physical body was still alive, I was dead on the inside, existing only for my lungs to bleed and my throat to rip to pieces as I screamed and screamed.