My Maddie (Hades Hangmen #8) - Tillie Cole Page 0,72

who looked just like him. Who just wanted to be just like him.

Isaiah. He didn’t want me. He wanted the brother who had died.

I breathed out smoke into the night air, and fucking hated myself when I looked through the window. I wished I hadn’t. I wished I’d turned toward the bar, like I’d intended. My chest was already fucking cracked in two, aching so fucking hard that I could barely breathe. But seeing Maddie on the bed, holding my brother’s hand to her stomach… and she was crying. Maddie, the strongest woman I knew, she was also breaking apart.

I moved my feet, managing to make it about a foot before my head pressed against the wood of the cabin. All the fucking energy in my body drained away. My feet gave way and I collapsed to my knees. I ignored my skin’s screams from my patchwork of stitches and snakebites. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t get to my feet and make my way to the fucking the bar. I had nothing left. I was being fucking drowned by all the shit in my head—Flame falling apart, Flame slipping into a darkness I doubted he could come back from, my words to him that ruined any love he might have felt for me, Maddie crying on the bed, his kid in her belly, and the chance he would never again be the Flame we all knew and loved.

I couldn’t hold them back. Nothing could have stopped the tears streaming down my face. Not even God himself could stop the sobs that came ripping like demons from my throat. My hands slammed to the ground. My lit smoke was crushed under my palm. And then like a dam bursting, every fucked up thing in my shit life barreled forward, shit no one knew. Shit I hadn’t confessed to a single person alive—my poppa lashing me with his belt, forcing me onto my knees, pushing his limp dick into my mouth, smacking my skull when he failed to get hard. I shook my head, but the memories became a tidal wave, nothing was gonna stop them—the cellar, Poppa trying to push inside me and when he couldn’t, assaulting me in other degrading ways.

My throat was raw with the tears and heavy breaths. “No!” I hissed, when I saw a rope hanging from a tree. I hit my head. “No!” I begged into the night. “Don’t show me her.” Maybe Flame was right, maybe I did have demons in my blood, maybe I shared his flames. Because despite my begging to God or anyone listening, I saw her. I felt myself walking to the tree, my mama swinging from the noose around her neck. Gone. Motherfucking gone. Unable to take my poppa’s shit anymore. Finding death by her own hand preferable to spending one more day with him. That’s what the fucker did. He destroyed his wives in every way until they couldn’t deal with life anymore, couldn’t even fucking stay behind for the sake of their kids. I clenched my teeth, trying to stop the uncontrollable tears and sobs pouring from my mouth. But it was all too much. All of this shit was too fucking much!

I stretched my hand up to the side of the cabin, trying to lift myself up. But then I saw Slash. He was in the trees, watching, always fucking watching me. I watched as Diego moved behind him, Slash dropping to the ground as Diego fired and he took a bullet for me. His eyes frosted over with death. Then I saw Flame tied to the tree, so fucking out of his mind that he didn’t even recognize his own wife. And Maddie, right now, crying beside Flame, who might never come back to her and their unborn kid.

I couldn’t do it. I had nothing left inside me to give. There was fuck all light, just a black hole that destroyed any joy or happiness I might have tasted. Apparently, it wasn’t in the cards for me—happiness. In no fucking part of my life could the joy and happiness stay without being wiped away by darkness and pain.

Lights suddenly flooded the clearing that contained the cabins. I heard a truck’s engine cut out and the distinctive sound of AK and Phebe’s voices. Saffie would be there too, silently walking behind her mama. I couldn’t see her, but I thought of her blond hair, her perfect fucking face and her eyes that saw too much every time