Pure Requiem - Aja James Page 0,32

utters, her eyes filled with something…I can’t really read.

“Stop calling me that,” I snap, a broiling fury bubbling like scalding tar through my chest, steaming up my face.

“What do you want to be called, then?” she asks, her tone soft rather than combative for once.

I don’t want her to call me anything. I don’t want to talk to her at all.

I hate her, I hate her, I hate her!

“Okay.”

I don’t even realize I spoke out loud until she says that, her face perfectly accepting.

“I’d hate me too if I were you,” she adds, her voice small.

Something twinges sharply in the left hemisphere of my chest.

“Just…go away,” I grit out, turning away from her.

“Let me bandage your hand, yeah? It’ll heal faster.”

I open my mouth to argue, but for some reason I don’t. I want her gone, but a strange part of me, probably those damned memories that are waking up, also wants her to stay.

She rummages around and comes to sit on my bed, wordlessly taking my hand in hers, and efficiently wraps it up.

“It should be healed in a few hours, at the rate you Immortals heal.”

Grudgingly, I ask, “What about your jaw?”

Her full mouth tilts at one corner as she looks up at me.

“What about it? You didn’t even crack it. When you wanna learn how to throw a real punch one of these days, let me know. I’ll teach you.”

“Pfft,” I mutter dismissively, a flush tinging my cheeks from embarrassment.

Gods! I’m useless. Can’t even knock out a little girl half my size. And a human besides!

“I deserve it,” she murmurs so quietly I almost don’t hear. “I deserve a lot worse for…what happened in our past. I’m sorry.”

My chest suddenly fills with acid. Furious, broiling tar shot through with acid. What a lovely cocktail of feelings to contain behind my ribcage.

“You’re sorry,” I echo.

“Yeah,” she says simply, staring into my eyes with those creepy owlish orbs.

“You’re sorry.”

I don’t know why I keep repeating that statement. I’m not entirely sure why I’m so fucking angry and…hurt.

Fucking hell, I hurt so bad I can’t breathe!

And I remember.

I remember everything.

She continues to stare at me, her eyes wide with distress and sorrow.

“You’re sorry!” I roar, shoving her with both hands suddenly and hard enough to make her fall off the bed, landing on her ass on the floor in a tangle of midget limbs.

“I tried to save you! I did it to save you! I let myself get fucked in every hole, torn apart from the inside out by five men for hours to spare you! And w-when it was done, and they left me in the dirt like rotten, pummeled, bloody meat, and a-all I wanted was a-a friend, and y-you…”

I choke through tears, my throat raw, my heart pounding with pain and fury. I gulp a breath, then another. I can’t breathe.

Everything fucking hurts!

“You…you said…you said…”

She launches her tiny, sturdy body at me, knocking me back. Her arms squeeze me so tightly I thought she was attempting to strangle me to death to make me stop blubbering. But then she’s murmuring beside my ear, her face buried in my hair.

I feel wetness that’s not my own, tricking hotly through my hair, mingling with my own tears as they leak uncontrollably down my face.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…” she repeats in a fervent litany, as if that will help the words sink in.

I don’t know how long she holds me, or how many times she repeats the words, but finally, my tears cease, and my breaths come and go in shuddering but subsiding gasps.

And still, she continues to hold me, her arms tight around my neck, her face in my hair. She’s so tiny she’s practically sitting in my lap. Rather belatedly, I realize that I’ve been holding her too.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats again, and I shudder one last time.

“It’s my biggest regret. A regret I’ve carried through all my incarnations. I don’t know how many I’ve had; I don’t recall them in detail. But I’ve always felt a profound, horrible kind of sadness. I think I searched for you in all my lives. Just to say these words: I’m so fucking sorry.”

I try to push her away again but she doesn’t let me, hanging on tight.

“When I was recruited as a Chevalier, Sophia took one look at me and said that I have a restless soul. I’m human, but I’ve had many lives. It’s unusual to say the least. Only immortal Pure souls are reincarnated. She says