Everyone knew what it meant.
The first day I was back, my father made me sit for hours while he tried to remove it. He’d used every micro-tool available to work the hinge free. V even tried to pry the collar off with tiny pliers. But the mechanism was too well made. The diamonds too well set.
It didn’t work.
Jewellers and diamond merchants put their hands up to try. They all failed.
As I lost the new Nila and stumbled with awful vertigo, my father slid deeper and deeper inside himself. After living with the constant questions and insinuations of how his wife died, he became a hermit. I no longer recognised him. We no longer had anything in common.
All of that was my life now.
I supposed I was lucky.
I supposed I should begrateful.
After all...
At least I was free.
Chapter Ten
Jethro
“KITE?”
I looked up from my desk. Jasmine wheeled herself into my room, her tiny hands wrapped around the stainless steel rims of her chair for propulsion.
It’d been ten days since Nila Weaver had left.
Two hundred and forty hours. Sixty-one tablets.
I was immune to everything.
Blank to everyone.
I couldn’t think about my life before without shuddering in pain. How had I withstood it for so long when this was so much better?
The past ten days I’d finally,finallyearned what I’d hoped all my life: Cut said he was proud of me. He’d been wary at first—never stopped watching—searching for a weakness...a chink in my surrender to my new addiction.
But this wasn’t a lie.
It was better this way. Easier this way.Survivablethis way.
I had no fears of making it to my thirtieth birthday anymore.
When he saw the truth, he gave me more and more control. He praised me for my clear-headedness and ruthless behaviour.
My siblings, on the other hand, weren’t pleased. They didn’t understand what it was like to live with my condition, and I was done being judged. I pulled away. I put up walls and fastened locks. I stopped visiting Wings as I became too busy to ride. I ceased my visits to Jasmine and put an end to late night chats with Kes.
All I needed was silence and my little rattling bottle of pills.
Nila had done me a favour.
She’d shown me how diseased I truly was. And with her disappearance came my cure.
If I had any feelings left to be dispensed, I would still have a fondness toward her. But I was happy being empty. I was free being immune to the insanity of life.
“Go away, Jaz.” I turned back to my task. Running my fingers over the paper Nila had signed the night of Cut’s birthday, I shook my head at my scrambled forward thinking.
