Destiny Gift (The Everlast Trilogy) - By Juliana Haygert Page 0,83
pain did stop a couple of hours later.
By then, I was screaming for Brock to come in and kill me because I couldn’t endure it anymore. He didn’t come. Instead, he sent a demon inside to pummel me. It punched my stomach.
When the burning inside me was gone, I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe.
Each time there were noises outside my door, I squirmed, afraid Brock would come in and give me more of that liquid.
I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of this. My life didn’t matter.
The last year of my life had been a lie. Why would I want to live it? Missing my family, I’d attached myself to someone not even real—my vision Victor—then had been nothing but an instrument in the plans of an evil goddess of love.
And Ceris thought she was better than Imha. Oh, boy, was she wrong. The ache in my soul outweighed the ache of my body. To know Victor, or Levi, or whoever he was, was with her now, making up for the time they had spent apart, ripped me apart in a way Brock’s torture couldn’t even come close to matching.
I felt incredibly jealous, even though I wasn’t sure what else to feel. If it all had been a lie, weren’t my feelings for Victor a lie too? I couldn’t discern it right now, and I didn’t want to discern it—ever. Why should I care about my life? It wasn’t even mine anymore.
I’d given up.
The door opened, startling me. The demons pushed someone inside. The person stumbled and fell to his knees. I gasped when I recognized Morgan.
“Nadine,” he groaned, crawling over to me. “By the Everlast, what have they done to you?” Being careful, he hoisted my head up and rested it on his legs. “Where is it hurting?”
“Everywhere,” I croaked.
“This is bad.” Morgan assessed my body, looking for visible wounds. Other than bruises from the punches and the scraped knee from the rock climbing, he found nothing. “Tell me how I can help.”
“I just want to sleep,” I said. But in my mind, I instead wished to die.
Morgan pulled me up to sit, propping me against a desk. “Did you get to Cathedral Rock?”
“Yes.” I sighed and told him everything that had happened since last speaking to him—the circle I drew on the rock top, the visions, the revelations about Ceris and Victor and Micah, the end of my gift, the argument, and the way the goddess fled.
“By the Everlast!” Morgan’s eyes shone. “I had been beside Levi and Mitrus these past few days!”
Yeah, I could see his point and understand his happiness. After all, the gods he worshipped so much were alive and had talked to him. More importantly, he had helped them.
But now we were here, trapped with Brock and the demons, missing Micah, and left to die.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“They found me a few miles north of Sedona.” He looked around the classroom. “We need to find a way to get out of here.”
“The only way out is death, and I’m longing for it.”
“What? You don’t mean that.”
I slid to the ground again. I had no strength to keep myself up. “I give up.”
“No, you can’t. Everyone wants to live. Everyone has a reason to live.”
“My life has been a lie.” I wanted to shout, but my weariness prevented my voice from being more than a whisper. “Victor, Micah, Cheryl. My feelings. The scholarship at NYU. The job at Langone. All a lie, and I was used.”
“And if it was? You’ll give up living because your heart was broken, because things weren’t what you anticipated? Come on, I expected more of you. I believed you were a fighter.”
How could he belittle the things that had happened to me?
Oh, and there was Micah. He had used me too. Had he known who he was and flirted with me just to be healed and led to Cathedral Rock?
Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
A few silent minutes passed, during which I avoided looking at Morgan.
“Can I ask something?” he said all of a sudden. I shrugged. “Could you sing, please? The silence is kinda scary.”
I stared at him. He was a man in his fifties who wasn’t afraid of admitting he was scared, a man who had risked his life for me, a man who would do anything for his dear creed. For him, I agreed.
I sang a light, romantic ballad. Of course, the lyrics were about lost love.