Chapter 92
Quill
Burning Paper Castle
FEAR
NF
No… no, no, no…
I wanted to gasp for air, needed my lungs to expand. But all that expanded were my eyes.
No…
I wanted to hold on to something, but there was nothing within reach.
There was only him, me, and the battlefield we were on.
Not a single inch of the floor was empty. Everything was covered in shredded paper.
My manuscripts…
A shudder ran through my legs until my knees gave way and I sank to the ground.
“No…,” I whimpered, reaching into the endless sea of paper scraps before me. “No…”
My messy handwriting covered the shreds, and I thought I recognized sequences of words that seemed familiar to me, until my vision became blurry and the scraps slipped from my numb fingers.
My lungs felt like they were constricting… Or was it my throat? All I knew at that moment was that I was unable to breathe.
My insides were tightening, while a tearing feeling of helplessness mercilessly took hold of me, and the first tears began to stream from my eyes.
Again and again I reached for the scraps in front of me, and the urge to scream out loud became more and more unbearable.
I opened my mouth, but couldn’t get a word out, while the tears streamed uncontrollably down my cheeks.
I had lost something, but I couldn’t quite grasp what it was yet.
There was a hole in my chest that grew larger with every passing second…
These had been my manuscripts. One-of-a-kind pieces that I had never been able to transfer to a computer before… before it had been too late.
It was too late.
My chest tightened painfully.
I had lost my stories. My books… Preserved moments of my soul that I would never be able to replicate again...
A violent sob overwhelmed me.
It felt as though millions of tiny fragments of my soul were burning at that very moment. As though I were watching them turn to ash before my eyes.
Pieces that I had tried to reconstruct into a picture in every spare minute of my time over the past few years. To create something beautiful out of the darkness within me.
Art.
Pieces of myself now slipping through my fingers. Pieces I would forever hear screaming for help inside me.
Torture.
Like spending years putting together a giant puzzle, only for an impulse-driven toddler to kick it until everything collapsed.
And the knowledge that I would never be able to put this puzzle back together in this way again, that I would never again remember all those lines that had given me – for fractions of a second – the illusion that I could put my feelings into long-sought words, sent such overwhelming pain coursing through my body that fainting threatened to overtake me.
Another sob tore through my throat.
Never had I felt closer to lifelessness than in that moment.
My paper castle… It was burning.
My manuscripts…
He had taken them from me.
Finally, with a runny nose and blurred vision, I managed to look up at him. At the man standing in the midst of the paper battlefield, both hands in the pockets of his black tuxedo, the expression on his face that of a madman on the verge of setting a city ablaze.
I should be afraid, should get out of here. But too many pillars within me were crumbling. Pillars that supported my sanity.
I blinked the tears away.
“What have you done…”
My voice was nothing more than a hoarse whisper.
Speaking every single word felt like the most exhausting thing in the world.
Everything inside me wanted to rummage through the chaos around me, turn over every scrap, and search for usable pieces, even pick up every single fragment and put them all back together.
How was I supposed to do that?
The scraps were so small…
There were millions of them.
How was I supposed to do that?
Something inside me contracted so violently that I forgot to breathe.
This must have been tens of thousands of sheets of paper that I had filled over the last six years.
Six years of work. Ruined.
Six years of my life. Erased.
As if I had never existed…
All those years, I had defined myself by what I had written on those pages. Things that were now destroyed. Gone. No longer retrievable...
My father had erased me.
A flood of tears streamed down my face.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t find them?”
He snorted contemptuously, turned away from me, and walked over my shards. My soul. A worn-out doormat to him.
“Under my own roof, Onera?”
He bent down for a larger piece of paper, picked it up, and… tore it up.
I closed my eyes in agony, letting the tears flow.
What had I done?
How could I have been so stupid…. So stupid, stupid, stupid…
“I should have made a fire out of it.” He dropped the shreds. “But apparently, you’re still so easy to break.”
Far too slowly, he walked on, toward the table where I had always written at night, brushing more scraps of paper off the tabletop as if they were annoying dust.
He should stop.
Just stop…
His expression hardened, and he stared at the massive television set I had never placed there.
“This ridiculous game is over. I want you to withdraw from university today.”
He spun around to face me, his gaze piercing me.
“And while we’re at it. You’re leaving this town first thing tomorrow. Once and for all. And if I ever see you near Davian or my family again, I’ll do whatever it takes to put you in your place.”
“No…”
When Silence Speaks
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I didn’t even know where I found the strength and courage to talk back to him. As if I no longer feared him.
What else did I have to lose that he could take from me?
I lay in pieces at his feet…
“What?”
He stared me down, sounding as if he hadn’t heard me right, which made me hold his gaze and force myself to block out the devastating chaos around us.
“No. I won’t leave Maplecrest.”
Not until you get what you deserve.
His right eyebrow twitched.
I expected him to raise his voice, was ready to cower, but he… just snorted in annoyance.
“Oh. Fine.” Both his eyebrows shot up. “Then let’s imagine for a moment that you keep your mouth shut. Imagine you actually make it through law school, which I doubt. You could work among the top lawyers.”
For years, I had wished I had what it took to become a lawyer, doctor, scientist, or engineer in real life. But writing and reading about it had to be enough for me.
There was a reason why life had placed not a stethoscope, not a compass and square, not a microscope, and certainly not a pair of scales in my hand, but a quill pen.
Forever I would chase the storm, fight to make a living from my books.
I had found peace in being a writer, but my father would never understand that.
I lifted my chin toward him, clenched my jaw.
“I will never trade the quill that saved me for the scales that got me into this situation in the first place.”
Again, he stared at me, and just a few years ago, this hesitation would have filled Gravia with hope. Hope that perhaps he would eventually understand and accept her, that he would choose her over the system.
Gravia was dead. And Quill knew that this man standing there would never change. Not even for Davian.
He snorted dismissively.
“Good thing I don’t plan on making another mistake by letting a parasite run free here, feasting on everything the elite of this society painstakingly built.
And I certainly can’t let you ruin my only true son.
” He turned away, pacing further across my soul carpet. “Davian is destined for greatness.”
“You should never have forced him…”
“Shut up, Onera!”
I flinched as he snapped around, and I recognized him more and more.
Who would have thought that the familiar, the trusted, could be so toxic? That it could be addictive…
I missed my Papa, and it would break me if I didn’t leave this town with Davian soon and finally leave him behind.
Papa had died the moment I was born.
“Just shut up!”
He raised his index finger, stepped toward me, warning in his glare.
“I’m so sick of hearing your voice! Of seeing you near him! How you leave your filthy mark on his life! How you fill him and fill him and fill him again with thoughts he’d never have on his own, because he’s a respectable man!”
He stopped a meter in front of me, staring me right into my abyss.
“Leaving Maplecrest?! Moving to Seattle?! With a teenage whore?!”
The lump in my chest contracted.
“He can count himself lucky to have me! That I clean up after him, just as I do for everyone in this town!”
Instinctively, I ducked, but he spun around in a rage, stormed over to the desk, and slammed his fists down on the tabletop.
That was him.
Joseph Richter.
The man without control. Without restraint.
“Davian will reveal who he really is.”
His hands clawed into the scraps on the tabletop, sending another flood of tears down my cheeks, before he spun around and glared at me with a deep furrow between his brows.
“What are you talking about?”
He was unsettled.
I had unsettled him.
“Oh, you’re going to like this.”
It was as if the madness that had usually been held back by my fear was speaking through my voice.
“Arnold is going to like this. And while we’re at it… I’m going to tell them who I am. And everything Joseph Richter has done. Let’s see who still wants to make a man like that the director.”
I knew I had gone too far when he fell silent, his jaw threatening to snap out of his skull.
“You won’t say a thing, because you’re going to jail!” he ground out.
“Oh, really?”
There was strength somewhere in my knees. Strength I used to rise to my feet.
It was as if I could feel the traces of Davian’s love coursing through my veins. Ink I hadn’t known I carried within me.
“Davian and I have prepared a lawsuit against the Maplecrest security network. For a flawed admission process that allows students to illegally enroll in the system. Maybe I’ll have to pay a fine. But that… is all.”
This man might be unpredictable. But unfortunately, his blood flowed through my veins. And he seemed to be realizing it, because his frozen gaze was fixed on me. As if he had forgotten how to breathe.
Triumph wanted to take root inside me, wanted to spread, urging me to turn around and leave this attic, to stay strong, even if that meant leaving my shattered soul behind in this place.
Suddenly, a devastating smile spread across his lips.
And it threw me completely off balance.
You’ll See
Gustavo Santaolalla, Juan Luqui
“I feared you would say something stupid.”
Slowly, he shook his head, as if I hadn’t just ruined him. As if, after everything, he still saw the stubborn little girl in me.
“Which is why I brought you something.”
He swept more scraps off the table.
“You know… Troy had many enemies.”
The lump in my chest slipped from its anchorage and my stomach sank as my fingers betrayed me with a twitch.
“But no one would ever have dared to cross the son of America’s most respected and feared lawyer.”
Why was he changing the subject? Why was he talking about Troy now?
Confusion overwhelmed me, trying to override all the other feelings inside me.
“And imagine what Arnold told me three weeks ago.”
He pulled something square and black out from under the scraps.
A videotape.
“That his property is equipped with eight surveillance cameras.”
All this ink that just won't stop flowing.
Why won't it stop?
I'm going to drown in it.
– Blue