“I’ll fix everything.”
Chapter 18
Liam
Being told that your death was imminent was like winning the reverse lottery.
He should have been surprised, he supposed. Shocked. Maybe even angry or scared. Somewhere deep down he probably was, it just wasn’t registering properly just yet.
All he could think about was how it just made sense with his luck. His whole life had been a shitpile of misery and struggle and apparently that was all he was ever going to get. An anomaly had happened with Fix. Liam had gotten to taste something good. A fleeting moment of happiness before whoever pulled the strings of life was like ‘oh no, we can’t have that. He can’t be happy, so off with him.’
The thought made him laugh. It came out a bit hysterical. Just slightly unhinged. He figured he had the right to be given everything.
In the days that followed he found himself clinging to Fix even more than before, as if the threat of death had made him drop the last of the walls he had between them. He wanted to soak itup. A melodramatic part of himself justified it as him wanting to experience as much joy as he could before his life ended.
Fix let him. He took Liam in his arms whenever he asked for it, kissed him and took him apart and made him scream and forget. And then he’d hold him, make him food, wash his hair, and paint his nails, all the while wearing the guiltiest expression on his handsome face.
Because the curses didn’t stop.
Despite his promises and reassurances, the curses still trickled in, and Liam knew Fix was blaming himself for it. He spent days and nights researching, calling in favors and making phone calls and ending up more and more frustrated when each one ended nowhere.
The Polaroid prints matched the flowers, but that meant they were still an unknown entity, O’Malley seemed less and less likely as any kind of suspect, and other than the curses the stalker had made no new moves. No gifts to take prints from. No trying to find Liam. They’d asked Liam’s neighbors in his building and they’d seen nobody coming or going. There was nothing but an endless stream of curses and a countdown hanging over their heads.
Fix tried keeping Liam in the loop as a cursebreaker at the same time as he tried to shield him from everything as his daddy, and Liam didn’t know how to tell him it was okay. He wasn’t blaming him for this. He was doing everything he could and if it didn’t work then…at least someone cared enough to do that much.
He didn’t think Fix would want to hear that. It sounded too much like Liam resigning himself to his fate.
Not that Liam truly wanted to die. He didn’t. He just knew his own luck, and now that there was an invisible countdown over his head he was terrified they wouldn’t be fast enough.
The curses kept popping up.
One of them would be the one that tipped the scale, but which one? Nobody could tell.
It was hard to act normally in the face of that, but he did his best to at least find some measure of calm so he wasn’t wailing around the corridors or refusing to get out of bed. There were bad days and good, but they continued to tick by slowly.
Fix was glued to his side unless he had to leave for work. The pinch in his expression said everything, but Liam wasn’t so selfish that he would deny anyone else Fix’s help. He didn’t want anyone ending up like him.
That left Liam wandering the halls of the cursebreaker house with King at his side, trying to be unobtrusive, staying out of the way of the chaotic comings and goings of the other brothers. They were a revolving door, always on the move.
He saw Midas the least, equal parts handsome and mysterious. Even when he did walk in he went straight to his own room and the door stayed closed, only the soft sounds of his footsteps and the waft of incense seeping from under the door.
Wren was also a quiet presence, out of the house more often than he was inside. Liam sometimes caught his figure wandering outside from the vantage of windows. He always had that small blue bird with him and a variety of other animals big and small trailing after him, the kind Liam had only ever seen pictures of before.
Ash and Black were hard to miss. They were explosions—sometimes literally—of color and sound. Ash was so easy to get along with that Liam found his exuberance to be exhausting given his mental state, so he had learned to steer clear of him. And Black he avoided…well, because he was still feeling sore over his relationship with Fix. It was childish, but Liam felt he was allowed a couple of vices considering the circumstances.
Hart was the one he talked to the most. More often than not Hart would appear the moment Fix had to leave the house, likehe had called him. Liam couldn’t prove it, of course, but he had a strong suspicion.
He didn’t mind so much though. He knew Hart better than any of the rest of them, and Hart, while he had his quirks like the rest of them, reminded him the most of Fix. His aura was soothing despite its uptight nature, and it was nice to sit at the kitchen counter with steaming mugs of tea and talk about inconsequential things.
He also offered advice, things like breathing techniques and exercises for panic attacks. Liam had so many pamphlets now he could start his own library. It felt like it wasn’t just business or a favor to Fix. It felt…friendly. Liam had held himself away from people on purpose for so long, and it was nice to finally connect.
It took his mind off things for a while, but it could never rid him of the anxiety.
The looming presence that hated him so much they wanted him dead.
The person who was too cowardly to face him head-on.
As more days trickled by, he grew restless with more than just anxiety. Something was beginning to build within him. The fire to fight had dragged him through life and now it was burning again, stronger than ever.
