be by myself and my own thoughts. I crave and function well in solitude. That’s what’s gotten me through this. By myself. Making plans. Scheming. Calculating. Trusting no one. I’d spend hours in the middle of the night dreaming on how to bring my plans to fruition and now those dreams, although still there, have company. New dreams.
Of Pike.
Now that I know him, now that I have felt his body against mine, inside mine, now I know he exists in this world, my solitude has become stifling. The air is thick and hard to breathe. The air is hotter and more humid than usual. I don’t just miss him. I crave him, body and soul. I find myself scratching at my own skin, trying to relieve an itch that isn’t on the surface and can’t be soothed by running my nails over my arms again and again until I draw blood.
Missing someone who is dead and never coming back doesn’t go away but dulls over time as acceptance settles in. Missing someone who is alive is a pain that only grows with each tick of the clock.
I didn’t cry when my family died. Not real tears. Just an act for Darius’s sake to prove I didn’t know what he’d done.
If I didn’t cry then, I’m not going to cry now. Even though I feel like my insides are broken. Even though I can’t breathe without feeling sharp pangs of regret. If only we were different people leading different lives. Maybe, I would be that summer tourist that catches his eye. Maybe, he’d be the bad boy who owned the pawn shop that I wouldn’t be able to help but to swoon over.
But none of that matters now. Not my aching heart or my empty soul. I came back to the Fourth Reich to fulfill my revenge alone and now I stay because of my sister.
That look in his eyes before he left. The warning of his words. It was all so…final.
For a second, with Pike at his shop and in his bed, I was happy. I laugh at myself. What is happiness anyway but a mixture of chemical reactions inside the brain? A splash of dopamine, a smidge of serotonin, and a little oxytocin for flavor. It’s a formula, not a feeling. The same effect can be achieved with a pill. It’s an illusion.
But knowing that happiness is an illusion doesn’t make my chest feel any less tight, or my throat any less dry, or my entire body feel less like it’s being slowly lowered into a dark fucking hole never to come out again. I take a deep breath to steady myself.
I. WILL. NOT. CRY.
Pike is the only person I ever saw myself in. Which sounds fucking delusional because we are so different, opposite in almost every way, except where we are the same. Our determination, our pain, our loneliness, the way we try to fill the gaps in our lives. Him with things in his shop, me with my research and revenge.
We’re both just filling a void. If it wasn’t for my sister, I would have taken his hand and went with him. Revenge doesn’t fill my heart the way Pike does. He’s the key.
And I just changed the fucking locks.
5
Pike
There’s no shittier feeling than knowing you have to kill someone whose pussy you can still taste on your lips.
Numb is all I want to feel, but every time I close my eyes, I imagine the look in Mickey’s eyes…right before I end her life.
It’s not a nightmare. It’s the fucking future. Maybe, I was dumb enough to believe, to hope, that she’d come with me, and I wouldn’t have to deal with the rest of this shit. A big part of me never thought she’d stay there, but she did. Again, she chose them.
Mic will be dead. Gone. Not of this fucking world.
It’s as if all of my ribs have been broken.
Nobody can see the injury, but it’s there, and it’s very real.
My face twists in agony with each memory of her. I hold my hand to my chest, rubbing the skin as if it could somehow ease the ache beneath, but it does nothing to help because there is no cure for the kind of sickness I’m suffering from.
Drowning myself in whiskey is the closest I’ve found to relief, but only because I drink enough to render myself unconscious, but the second my eyes open, I reach for her. I think of her. I still smell