Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
My eyes fluttered open as I took in my surroundings.
The softness of my mattress was a stark contrast to the tight knot that had taken hold of my insides.
I could feel the rise and fall of something soft next to me, Mortimer’s quiet purrs pulling me further from my daze.
I shifted, feeling something tickling at my feet, which worked to dissipate the fog of sleep that had clutched to the corners of my mind.
Sitting up, I took in my pillow-strewn living room and the monstera brushing against my exposed toes.
I stared into the eyes of Judd Nelson and his chagrined face as he took in the sight of Molly Ringwald and her high-brow sushi platter–one of my favourite scenes in The Breakfast Club.
The last thing I could remember was falling asleep in Thallor’s arms, but he was nowhere to be found as I wrapped my terracotta duvet around me, huddling into it as if it might blanket me from my own thoughts.
But in the absence of Thallor, my apartment felt painfully quiet.
And without the distractions around me, without the distractions in my own head, the thoughts of the previous night bombarded me like artillery fire, and I scrambled to my feet, legs weak below me as I dashed toward my bathroom.
Dropping to the floor with a force that would likely leave my knees bruised, I retched over and over.
The concerned meows of my cat echoed out in between the sounds of bile hitting the porcelain bowl below me, but I could hardly hear them over the phrase that repeated in my head–a taunting, harrowing mantra of everything I’d done.
I killed a man. I killed a man. I killed a man.
My mind trapped me in the confines of my own torment, refusing to free me as the tears streaked down my face. I hung my head over the side of the toilet bowl and began to cry all over again.
It was self-defence. I pleaded with myself.
It was self-defence. As if that could possibly assuage the guilt I felt.
It was self-defence. As if my words could ever return the life to the man that had lay unflinching and unmoving in a carmine puddle of my own making.
I hated it. I hated him. I hated what he had tried to do.
I hated what he made me do. That man hadn’t taken my life, but he had taken the singular thread that was holding me together.
I had to live with the aftermath of his actions, and I couldn’t help but feel like that was crueller than anything he could have done to me.
I was so lost. So hopelessly lost, traipsing down path after path in my own head, searching for the answer to how I might survive this, that I didn’t hear the front door open and close.
I didn’t hear the creaking of floorboards or the heavy foot of Thallor as he walked into my bedroom.
I only noticed his presence when he stooped down behind me, placing a tender hand on my back.
“I’m here. You’re safe,” he said quietly from behind me. “Do you want to talk about it?”
No. Yes. I did and I didn’t. But I knew deep down that I couldn’t.
I’d never be able to feel those feelings again.
Their rawness would never clutch at me with the same power they did when I’d felt them for the first time.
All my body would allow me to do was rationalise them.
Understand them. Dissect them with cool, separated logic.
“I called you, you know.” I could barely bring myself to say the words. The feeling of disappointment gnawed at me just below the skin, but the words came out choked. They came out hesitant. “You said the first night that I could call you and you would come.”
“I know, Sterling.” I could hear it in his voice. The guilt. “I’m sorry.”
“I called for you and you didn’t answer. I needed you.” I’ve never let myself need anyone before.
“Sterling.”
“I thought I was going to die.”
“I would never have let that happen,” he said, giving me a pleading look. Like he needed me to listen to him. Like he needed me to understand.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier? If I just…” The intent behind everything I said was cold and hard, but the words themselves came out soft. Like I barely had the courage to ask them.
“Don’t finish that sentence. Don’t finish that train of thought. It’s not like that, it has never been like that.”
A pause.
And then another.
And then the seconds seemed to stretch between us, infinitesimally, lingering between those beats of silence.
In the cracks between two people who were thinking the same thing but neither had the courage to say it out loud.
For a long moment, we just stared at each other because the question, in its ambiguity, created more confusion than clarity.
The question asked a thousand things, and neither of us seemed willing to ask each other or ourselves.
It said things like explain where you were.
Explain last night. Explain what you meant when you said you didn’t hate me.
Explain why my pulse seems to ignite when you are near.
Explain why you kissed my forehead and held me close, because I know that isn’t part of this treaty.
The images of blood on my hand and my clothes… The images of it pooling across the floor barrelled into my head again. “Did I kill him?” I spoke the words quickly and quietly as if that might stop me from speaking everything I feared into existence.
“No.”
“He looked dead,” I whimpered, stumbling over the words as tears continued to stream down my face.
Thallor’s hand moved slightly as if he wanted to wipe the tears from my cheek, but thought better of it. “I promise you, Sterling, he wasn’t dead.”
“Did you kill him?” I looked up at him, meeting his eye.
“I didn’t kill him.”
“What did you do to him?”
I could see it then—the way the cogs whirred behind Thallor’s distant gaze.
The whites in his eyes had disappeared, the usually bright red turning a deep burgundy.
His jaw clenched as he looked down at me.
This time, I didn’t see Thallor, but the monster underneath, and he was angry.
Angry for me. Angry for us. “I… He…got what he deserved. Know that no one will ever know of him. No one will ever mention him again. I have wiped his existence from this world. His soul is where it belongs. Rotting in the deepest corners of Hell. He deserves everything that’s coming to him.
Every ounce of suffering. He deserves it all for the rest of eternity for what he did to you. I made sure of that.”
“Thallor…” I said, but I didn’t move. I wasn’t scared. Not as I once was. I understood what he had done and why he needed to do it. But in that moment, it felt as though I hadn’t made that wish for me at all, but for him.
“My brother takes a sick pleasure in tormenting the damned in a way that I have never understood.
In fact, he would torture any soul he could get his hands on, deserving or not.
Where I have struggled with my path in life, he has relished in the agony of every soul he meets.
My brother is everything bad I see in myself–a true monster born from cruelty.
I would never ask him for anything. I would never go to him for help.
But for this, I didn't hesitate to make sure he understood that every ounce of pain he inflicted was nothing compared to the hell this man had earned.
He's better off with my brother, where he will experience no mercy, no forgiveness, no reprieve.”
He spat the words. There had been many a time when I’d seen Thallor get angry.
There had been many times when I questioned if the monster inside him would make an appearance, showing its face and reminding me just how terrifying he was, but it hadn't.
Thallor made sure of that, well, he had until now.
It wasn't the words I spoke that broke me from my stupor but the claws that jutted from the end of his fingers; the black, greying skin ran up his arm like tendrils of dark, wispy smoke.
He looked down at his hands and took one long, exasperated breath, and then another, and then another.
It took a while, but eventually, the claws retracted on his skin and went back to normal.
“I know it's not what you asked for, but I can rest easy knowing that I helped ensure this man's soul burns for everything that he did.”
Before I could say anything else, before I could close the gap between us, before I could tell him that I wasn't scared.
Before I could tell him that I saw the monster inside him and did not cower from what I saw, but revelled in the beauty of everything that he was, Thallor stood up and walked out my front door, not stopping to turn around before he left my apartment.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it happened right under my nose.
In my self-assuredness and my steadfast belief that I didn't need another person to make me happy–in woven threads of red–Thallor tied himself to the deepest darkest parts of me.
It happened slowly, in those disgruntled looks and endless eye rolls.
In the gruff of displeasure and in the way he would stare for just a little too long.
In the endless slices of strawberry jam on toast, in the gentle touches and the lingering kisses to my forehead.
And then all at once it was as if he had become so ingrained in my life that I struggled to picture what it had been like without him.