Two for Joy - Louise Collins Page 0,15

a sign that he was okay, or maybe a thank you for cheering him up. Romeo didn’t know exactly why Chad had sent it, or why he had risked exposing their secret connection, but in that moment he didn’t care.

Romeo looked at the envelope. The address to the prison had been printed, and there was no return address, only a sorting office sticker over the stamp. Romeo tried to make out the word, the letter hadn’t come from Berkshire, or anywhere near it. Chad had posted it from afar so it couldn’t be traced back to him.

Clever magpie, Romeo thought, gazing at the feather.

“You gonna explain about the feather?” Will asked.

“No.”

Romeo laid down on his bunk, and using a bit of sticky tac, pinned the feather to the wall next to Chad’s face, and the article with the headline, The One That Got Away.

****

The anger rose up inside him, stifling, thickening, something sicky and hot building in his belly. He threw a stone, and the dumb bird skipped out of the way, it even opened its beak, and let out its chattering call, as if it was laughing at Romeo’s attempt.

He had set it free, he was doing a good deed, but it didn’t go. It followed him, turned up outside his bedroom window day after day, mocking him.

Romeo picked up another stone and threw it. He released it from his grip too soon, he missed the magpie completely, and instead the stone bounced on the roof slates. One slipped, and just as the magpie opened its mouth to chatter, it came down on top.

Romeo wanted to hear it, the laughter. He wanted to see it effortlessly skip out of the way using the wing he’d fixed, he wanted it to mock him, but there was only silence. The hollow silence between a lightning flash, and the rumble of thunder. He felt it in his chest, an intense emptiness where his anger had swelled.

He stumbled forward on shaky legs, eyes unblinking on the magpie. The one thing in the whole world that saw underneath the mask. The one thing that had refused to leave him despite the ugliness inside him.

He’d killed it.

But that wasn’t anything new, he’d killed before.

Bugs, rodents, other birds—he’d been crushing the eggs for years—but there had always been sick satisfaction With the magpie there was only the emptiness, and something else, something higher in his chest where his heart pounded. A tightness, a compression, a cold sensation. A gutting realization that whatever he did, whatever he tried, whoever he wanted to be, wasn’t possible.

He and the monster were inseparable, indistinguishable, and he needed to accept it.

Romeo approached the dead magpie, and right before his eyes it turned into Chad.

Chad on the mattress in the crumbling farmhouse. Chad with a dark bruise on his neck, and a red raw burn on his chest.

Number one.

He kneeled, touched Chad’s clammy face, stroked the back of his fingers against his hair, as soft and smooth as a magpie’s feathers. He encouraged Chad to wake, but there was no response. He was dead, and Romeo knew by the ache in his hands, he’d done it.

The tightness, the cold sensation felt worse than before. He felt sick with it, fevered by it, and he yelled his anguish, as heartbroken and tortured as the howl Chad released over his dead dog.

Romeo woke panting, covered in sweat. He flexed his hands, trying to stretch out the ache. He could smell burned flesh and fell to his knees on the floor before shuffling over to the toilet. He vomited as quietly as possible, then wiped his mouth on some tissue.

“You okay?” Will called.

Romeo heard him at the bars to his cell, knocking them to let Romeo know he was there. Romeo flushed the toilet, then sat by his own set of bars.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Another nightmare?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus, Romeo, it’s every few days since you got here. You gonna tell me about them yet?”

Romeo snorted. The magpie dreams had always been a part of his life since he’d killed it, but Chad had infiltrated them.

“I was dreaming about … about Chad.”

“You mean the one you didn’t kill?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s some obsession if dreaming about him alive makes you shout like that.”

Romeo didn’t bother correcting Will. Everyone made their own assumptions, and he let them. His nightmare came from imagining he’d killed Chad, not from Chad escaping his clutches.

He’d thought about killing Chad when they were in the farmhouse together. It was like having a permanent itch and