I stared at him, waiting for him to say more, waiting for the voice to rampage through me, but they seemed to have slunk back into the shadowed corners of my mind. The murmurs were louder than before, but at least they weren’t destroying me. At least I could still be here with her.
Focusing on the clarity of my mind once more, I leaned against the door as I breathed and tried to think of something to say, some way to answer that wouldn’t leave me battling the same demons.
“I want you to have your heart back.” I tensed as her voice came through the door again, my heart beating in a panic at what was coming. “Not because I don’t love you, but because I do, just not in that way.”
Her words froze as my eyes snapped open, and the words that I had tried so hard to say to her came back to me in a whisper that rang with so much truth that, in that moment, I was sure the voice, the monsters, the torture, and everything were nothing more than a memory.
“I want you to have your heart back because I don’t want you to hurt anymore. I want you to feel like yourself.”
I stared at the wood, my mind feeling sluggish as my heart rate accelerated.
I wanted the same thing.
I wanted to tell her that.
I wanted her to understand.
I don’t want to hurt anymore, just as I don’t want her to hurt anymore.
Without the voice, without the madness, it was all I wanted. It was all I wanted to give her.
My fingers tensed against the wood as I looked down to the necklace, down to the spirals of the silver chain and the deep red of the stone.
I picked the necklace up carefully, my hand shaking as I wrapped the fine chain around my clumsy fingers, careful not to let the stone touch my skin. Not yet, not when I wanted the contents of the stone to return to me so badly.
It looked so much different than it had the day I had purchased it from the overly snot-nosed salesmen at the jewelry store in New York. It was still the same diamond, still the same necklace; it just held something inside of it, is all.
I had traveled to the city with Cail the summer before I had given it to her. We were following a lead to what we had hoped would be Ilyan’s capture while taking a few select souls from their homes and into the dungeons where my father conducted his experiments.
It was something I had done a hundred times before—tried to capture my brother, taken innocents and given them to my father.
I had never enjoyed it, though.
How could I?
Regardless, I didn’t have a choice. I was trapped.
As much as it made my stomach turn, I had gone through the motions. I had done everything as I was asked so as not to uncover my father’s wrath, despite my mind being full of my best friend and the summer following when she would be pulled from me forever.
I had a foot each in two different worlds—the one I wanted and the one I was forced to live with.
Perhaps that was why the store had called to me.
I could see the blue frontage from the hotel room. I saw it as we walked from place to place. I saw it in my mind as I took life after life. The more I thought of the world renowned name, the more the idea began to cement itself in my mind.
A simple gift holding the most precious thing I had to give her. Something that, even though she would not realize it at the time, was more than a simple token of my affection. It was my affection.
And it would keep her safe.
It was all that I had wanted, and it had done anything but.
“When I made this, I had no idea who you really were,” I whispered, unsure if I was talking to her or to myself. Perhaps it was both. “I wanted you to have it forever because I knew I would never see you again. I was going to run away and try to disappear. Anything to keep myself from what Edmund had planned for me. My father had been training me for years to hunt Ilyan. I wasn’t even going to school.” You were working for me. “He was going to send Cail and me on a kamikaze trip to kill my brother.” I already have, you know; he’s right there. And you are going to kill him for me. “I guess, in some ways, that still happened. And then, when I found your kiss, and I knew I could use you against my dad”—Don’t use her! Kill her! Do it now!—“to make him hurt the way he had made me hurt. Hurt. Hurt.”
I retold the story to her, desperate for her to know. To hear.
However, the more I talked, the more my mind shattered, the barrier breaking away until it was little more than rice paper. The voice sparked in and out of my mind as quickly as if they were nothing more than a scratched movie disk. I jerked at each outburst, my spine seizing in anxious tension as they grew, as they took over.
I knew that Sain was speaking next to me—I could hear the rumble of his voice—but I couldn’t focus beyond the voice. I couldn’t focus enough to stop myself from banging my head against door that I leaned against.
“Hurt. Hurt. Hurt,” I mumbled, the word on repeat as the voice grew.
“Ryland,” Sain’s voice grew in volume as the voice in my head did, the sound reverberating through my skull enough that I could pull myself away.