They didn’t care.
I was just held and tortured because Domenico was too cowardly to kill me and too arrogant to think I actually held any information. For a long time I feared I was just a puppet being tortured in order to make Saoirse suffer until I learned from her that she thought I was dead.
Maybe I was, for a time.
It felt like it.
My last bout of attacking the door ends in a deafening silence where pressure seems to swell inside my room and only eases when I slam my hands over my ears. Every bone inside me seems to have a mind of its own and I can’t sit still. I have to pace back and forth between each wall while counting to ensure that the walls aren’t closing in and I’m not about to get crushed between them.
Sometimes, pain lances through my leg and I miscount. The thump of panic that slams into my chest each time is enough to bowl me over, and I resort to counting out loud as slowly as I can while placing one foot in front of the other.
I lose track of how long I do that for because eventually, in the smothering solitude of my cell, there’s nothing to distract me from the noise of pain deep in my soul.
No one talks about how silent it is after someone dies.
You don’t just grieve the loss of them as a person. You grieve everything thatshouldhave been in your future. I wanted to see Cormac take his kids for their first riding lesson at the ranch. I wanted to see Saoirse realize I’m the coolest uncle to her kids and suffer while I taught her little ones every trick in the book to annoy her. I wanted to watch them all grow up in their little families and watch as our rather quiet, yet brutal Mafia family blossomed into one of life and love.
Something that felt impossible after Brenden died.
Instead, I’m the one left alone.
There’s no one here for me.
No one to watch me grow old or whisper advice in my ear, no one to rib me when I’m being a dick or drag up my past mistakes to win an argument.
How fucked is that? I miss arguing with Saoirse. I miss how often we’d settle it silently because we often didn’t have to talk to understand each other.
I miss them.
Tears prick the corners of my eyes after my umpteenth pacing of the cell so I count louder while trying not to dwell on the cavern of agony inside me.
It doesn’t work.
My eyes blur, causing me to trip unexpectedly over my own ankle. I go down like a sack of bricks and land on my ruined leg. The flash of pain, a deep ache like pressing on a bone-deep bruise, flashes me right back to being down on the ground with no restraints because I was too weak to fight back.
I couldn’t stop them chipping into my very bones through the exposed tears in my leg from the crash because I was too weak. I was a mess, held together by sheer spite and whatever dregs of adrenaline still existed in my heart.
The flash passes when I scramble backward to escape an incoming scalpel and my back hits the wall, knocking me right back into the present where it’s just me and this infinitely white, constantly empty cell block.
Maybe I died that day.
Maybe this is hell.
No.
If I died that day, Faina wouldn’t be here.
Kind, beautiful, powerful Faina. Her face flits to the forefront of my mind along with the last time I saw her.
Gunned down in that street trying to save my life.
Why did she do that?
Out of the two of us, she stands the higher chance of survival, so why would she do that for me?
She loves me.
Wishful thinking.
