Chapter Thirteen #2
“So this is where they put you.” My voice comes out flat. Dead. Good. That's what I need right now… dead. I can do dead. Dead is easy. Dead doesn't make your hands shake or your chest cave in or your eyes sting like you're some weak little fuck.
I read the second name and something ruptures.
It's not dramatic. There's no scream, no explosion of rage.
It's worse than that. It's quiet. It's this tiny, almost imperceptible fracture somewhere deep in the center of me, like a bone that's been carrying weight for years finally giving way.
I feel it spread, hairline cracks spider webbing through everything I've built to keep myself standing.
No.
I look away. I look at the sky, at the trees, at the dead grass, at anything that isn't those two slabs of stone sitting side by side the way they always used to sit beside me. Left and right. Always on either side. Always with me.
Stop.
“You shouldn't have died.” The words are out before I can catch them and they don't sound like me. They sound like someone younger. Someone I killed a long time ago. I take another drink and the burn doesn't help this time. Nothing's burning hot enough to scorch this thing out of my chest.
I crouch down, and I don't know why. I don't believe they can hear me. I don't believe in any of that shit—no afterlife, no heaven, no peaceful fucking paradise where they're smiling down at me.
They're gone.
They're bones and dirt and nothing, and crouching in front of their graves like some grieving widow isn't going to change a goddamn thing.
But my knees bend anyway.
And my hand, my bloody, glass-torn, swollen hand reaches out anyway.
My fingers touch the top of the first headstone and the cold of it hits me like a bullet.
Cold.
Stone cold.
They were never cold. Neave ran so hot he'd sweat through his shirt just sitting still and Miles was always warm, always had that stupid body heat that made him a furnace in the winter and unbearable in the summer.
I used to shove him off me when he'd throw his arm around my shoulder because he was too goddamn warm and now… Now he’s cold.
They're both so fucking cold.
My hand is trembling against the stone and I'm watching it like it belongs to someone else.
That's not my hand. I don't tremble. I don't shake.
I'm Xaden-fucking-Devlin I'm the guy who doesn't flinch when bullets fly, who carved his empire out of blood and bone, who has looked men in the eyes while the life drained from them and felt nothing.
So why can't I stop shaking?
“You were supposed to be here.” It comes out broken. Cracked right down the middle. I swallow hard, once, twice, three times, trying to shove the thing in my throat back down where it belongs. “You were supposed to be right fucking here, right beside me, you selfish, you stupid—”
My voice gives out.
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
Louder than the horn blaring when I beat the steering wheel, louder than the glass shattering under my fist, louder than every gunshot I've ever fired.
It's the silence of two people who should be answering me and aren't. Who will never answer me again.
I bring the bottle to my lips but I don't drink. My hand is just hovering there, frozen, because there's a memory fighting its way to the surface and I'm losing the battle to keep it down.
Neave, leaning against the hood of my car, grinning that shit-eating grin, saying, “Bro, we're gonna get the fuck out of here soon.” Miles beside him, quieter, steadier, rolling his eyes but smiling, that half-smile he did where only the left side of his mouth lifted saying, “Nah, we're gonna get fucking drafted and take over the NHL.”
And me in the middle. Laughing.
The sound of my own laughter echoes through my memory and it's so foreign, so impossibly distant, it might as well belong to a dead man. Maybe it does. Maybe I died with them and just forgot to stop breathing.
My eyes burn.
I feel it building, the wave, the real one, the one I've been outrunning for months, for years, the one that lives underneath all the rage and the violence and the alcohol and the sleepless nights.
It's not anger. Anger I can use. Anger I can aim at someone and pull the trigger.
This is something else entirely. This is the hollow, starving, bottomless thing that opens up when you realize that the people who made you feel human are gone and they took that part of you with them into the ground.
My throat convulses.
My vision blurs.
“No.” I say it out loud, like that'll stop it. “No, I don't—I'm not doing this.”
But my hand is still on the headstone and I can't make myself pull it away.
My fingers curl over the top of it like I'm trying to hold on, like if I grip hard enough I can somehow reach through the stone and the dirt and the death and find them.
Find Miles' hand. Find Neaves's shoulder. Find something warm and alive and mine.
There's nothing there.
There's nothing fucking there, and I know it, but my fingers are still gripping.
A sound comes out of me that I don't recognize. It's low, guttural, wrenched from somewhere so deep I didn't know it existed. It's not a scream. It's not a cry. It's the sound an animal makes when it's been wounded so badly it doesn't know how to die yet.
I let go of the headstone like it burned me, standing up so fast the world tilts.
I stumble back, bottle sloshing, and the grief is right there…
right there pressing against my ribs, filling my throat, flooding in behind my eyes, and I can feel myself about to shatter.
I’m about to come apart in this godforsaken cemetery, in front of two slabs of rock that are all that's left of the only people who ever made me feel like I was more than a weapon.
So I do the only thing I know how to do.
I get angry.
“Fuck you!” I hurl the bottle at the ground between their graves and it explodes, glass and vodka spraying across the stone.
Toren jumps backward and gasps. I'm screaming at them now, at my dead best friends because rage is the only language I have left.
“You left me here! You fucking left me and I told you not to fucking go without me!
You never fucking listened to me and now you're here. You're in the fucking ground and I'm—”
Alone.
The word almost makes it out. Almost slips past the wall of fury I'm throwing up with everything I have. But I catch it. I clamp down on it, crush it between my teeth, and swallow it whole.
I will not say it. I will not give it a voice, because if I do, if I let that word exist in the air between me and their graves then it becomes real.
Then I have to sit with the fact that every room I walk into for the rest of my life will be missing two people and nothing I conquer, nothing I claim, nothing I kill will ever fill that space.
I stand there. Breathing hard. Chest heaving. Blood dripping from my knuckles onto the wet grass.
The moon is still up. The graves are still there. The dead stay dead.
And I stay angry because it's the only thing that keeps me from lying down between them and never getting up.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and I don't acknowledge what I find there. I turn my back on them. I walk away.
I don't look back.
If I look back, I'll stay, and if I stay, the softness will win, and if the softness wins, there'll be nothing left of me worth using.
And I need to be useful. I need to be sharp, ruthless and empty because there are people who need to pay for this, people who need to die screaming, and dead men don't get vengeance.
So I keep walking.
And behind me, the graves sit in the silence, side by side, the way they'll sit forever—waiting for me to come back and feel what I refuse to feel.
I won't.
I can't.