“Cocksuckers!” Jiminy roars, coming to my rescue, but a blow to the face takes him down too.
Two on him. Three on me. As he predicted, getting our asses beat.
“Move!” Nolan orders.
The battering stops, and something hard is smashed against my temple. Then… complete darkness.
“Sam, wake up.” Jiminy’s worried voice penetrates my fuzzy brain. “Can you hear me?”
My eyes blink open to his bruised face hovering above me. I grimace, struggling to an upright position, though my body protests in agony. I scan the four corners of the classroom, searching forher.
“She’s gone,” Jiminy answers my unspoken question and offers me his hand. “You were out for about five minutes. That fucker Nolan decked you with a chair.”
I slump my weight onto the nearest desk. “She said she didn’t know me,” I murmur.
“I know.”
Zilphia tore my heart out and spat on it. She didn’t just leave me. She left me bleeding—literally.
And somehow, I still love her.
But it’s a twisted love now—the kind that wants to maim. I want to hurt her and worship her at the same time. She’s myweakness… the one person who could break me. I thought she was my savior, but she was my tormentor in disguise all along… just a trick of the light.
“Your ear is bleeding,” Jiminy observes. “You should go to the hospital to play it safe.”
“Give me your lighter,” I say, ignoring his advice.
He delves into his hoodie pocket and drops the small brass canister in my outstretched hand. I detest cigarettes, but tonight his bad habit works in my favor.
“Go home,” I instruct him and hobble toward the door.
Jiminy barricades himself in the doorway. “What are you going to do?”
“It doesn’t concern you. Go home,” I reiterate between grinding teeth.
“Leave it be, Sam,” Jiminy warns. “Zilphia made her choice. The pretend world you two created was bound to crumble eventually.”
Jiminy pours salt into the festering wound, and the last fiber holding my control intact unravels. I capture his neck and slam him into the wall.
“Go the fuck home!”
I release my hold and burst into the hallway, taking off at a dead run. Identical to the rainy night almost five years ago, a voice beckons me, but it isn’t destiny’s lulling drawl. It’s wrath’s sinister monotone, goading me on, demanding Iburn it.
Burn it.
Burn it.
Burn it.
My rumpled sneakers sail over the terrain at top speed, only sliding to a halt when the tree house fills my vision. Memories taunt me, cackling at the stupid boy for daring to hope. I should’ve stayed in my own world. Violent tremors rock me to the core as tears fall down my cheeks. My heart is in ruins.
I want to forget her. Press the rewind button and change thecourse that led me to her doorstep. I peer at the inky-black sky, damning the Fates for cruelly tempting me.
Single-minded determination propels me across the freshly cut grass. I hop the wooden gate and clear the stairs to the tree house in seconds, then my rampage commences.
The TV’s first. Gone.
The bookshelf. Splintered.
