Mirage_ A Dark Retelling (The Veiled Love Duet) - C.M. Radcliff
Prologue
LYING ON MY BACK, my eyes scan the flawless, bright white ceiling. Not a single mark or an uneven paint stroke is visible.
Impossible.
Perfection is a fabricated expectation in life. All our souls are tainted and eventually our sins slip through the cracks, exposing the truth.
We’re all flawed, but some of us can hide it better than the rest… just like the ceiling above me.
A warmth circles around me and sticks to my skin. My body’s numb to every sensation, but the feeling of my own blood saturating my clothes. My long, thick black hair is fanned out around my head, absorbing the liquid.
My body is rendered immobile and my vocal cords are paralyzed. I’ve been silenced and made a prisoner within my own skin.
The sound of my heart pumping leaves a whooshing tune ringing in my ears. With every passing moment, it’s becoming weaker and I’m slowly sinking deeper into myself and farther away from here.
I’m bleeding out.
I’ve witnessed death before, but I never imagined my own. I knew one day it would come to this and it’s a miracle that it took this long.
This isn’t the first time that Jasper laid his hands on me, but it is certainly going to be the last. We’re edging past the point of no return and he’s got his foot pressing the pedal to the metal.
Smiling to myself, I chuckle inwardly, feeling it in my chest. It’s all quite ironic. I’m lying here on the floor, bleeding out at the hands of a cardiothoracic surgeon. He saves lives, but not mine.
Mine, he decided he would take.
It was never a decision for him to make.
♦♦♦
There’s movement throughout the room, but it’s too fast for my sluggish eyes to follow. There’s a shift in the air and I don’t need to see him to know he’s here.
Axel.
He saved me and he brought me back to life. He showed me how it feels to truly be loved.
He did everything he could for me and now he’s going to have to let me go.
He was the love of my life and now the love of my death.
Wherever I go from here, I’ll carry a piece of him with me.
Axel is everywhere, filling the room and my senses. His smell and the sound of his voice, it’s as if I can feel him without touching him. His presence alone consumes me.
He keeps my head above the water, just as I begin to go under.
The weight and the pressure vanish into thin air and suddenly, I’m no longer sinking. I’m caught in a dreamlike state, where none of this feels real.
I’m weightless and it’s relieving, it’s comforting. I’m floating, suspended in the air, and there’s no coming down from here.
The warmth surrounding me on the floor, seeps inside and warms my soul. My sins are free, and it soothes over the cracks in my façade.
Only in the moments of our death are we flawless.
♦♦♦
A loud bang rings through the air and penetrates my eardrums. The lights grow dim and I’m no longer floating.
I’m not sinking.
I’m plummeting downward, spiraling out of control with no end in sight.
Like the flip of a light switch, everything goes black and everything becomes nothing.
Chapter One
Axel
DROPLETS OF BLOOD spray across my face as my fist connects with the side of his jaw. His mouth falls open as his head jerks away from me and toward the crowd surrounding us. He stumbles backward, barely catching himself and I’m barely a step behind him, cocking my arm back. Watching me from the corner of his eye, he sees me coming for him.
And I anticipate his actions.
He throws an uncoordinated punch and I stand firm. I don’t duck, I take it. I let him get that one hit, but for my own selfish reasons. He gets a cheap shot in, splitting my bottom lip open on my teeth. Running my tongue over my lip, I taste the blood and a grin slowly creeps onto my face as I step back into his space. With one final blow to the side of his head, my opponent falls to the ground with a loud thud.
Dressed in their designer suits and elegant dresses, the crowd outside of the ring cheer. They’re all colorblind, to every color except green. It’s easy to forget how illegal this is until you see tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars being handed back and forth between the onlookers.
Illegal street fighting was all that I had in life. I learned how to fight at a