The paperweight grows warm in my hand.
My eyes are burning, my jaw aching the harder I clench it.
A particularly offensive line makes me throw back my head for a wild laugh. I blink at the low light in the room. No wonder my eyes are so fucking tired.
I should eat something. Sleep.
Instead, I switch on a nearby lamp, get my bottle of bourbon and a glass. The first sip burns my lip like fire, but the pain numbs to a sullen ache as I keep working my way through the Gospel of Evelyn. Night comes early, but I don’t notice. The only times my eyes leave the page is when I glance up to refill my glass, or roll my eyes at one of her delusional passages.
I’m on my fourth glass of bourbon before I break the frigid silence inside my home with an angry mutter.
“JesusfuckingChrist.”
The bourbon’s almost empty when I shove the stack of papers off my lap, and rush to my feet.
My chest rises and falls. Faster. Hyperventilating now.
Struggling, but unable to calm myself.
“Cunt,” I puff out, the word sounding too soft, like a bruised, overripe fruit.
…you psychotic cunt…
Kai’s voice echoes in my head, so loud, I’m forced to drown it out with my own.
“You fucking cunt!”
There’s a deafeningcrackas the paperweight slams into the sliding door leading onto the courtyard behind my house.
I jerk in shock, gaping in horror at the web of fracture lines that appear like magic in the glass.
The Northern Blue trapped inside that clear glass ball spins as the paperweight rolls back to me, stopping only when it hits the edges of the thick rug near the end of the couch.
I don’t dare go over to pick it up. To check if it’s damaged.
Schrödinger’s butterfly, simultaneously intact and shattered until observed. The uncertainty feels oddly comforting.
Control is exhausting, and for once, I’m enjoying not knowing the outcome of my actions.
The irony isn’t lost on me—I who pride myself on perfect control, undone by words on paper. I can manipulate Haven and Kai into sexual submission with perfect calculation, yet Evelyn still reduces me to a trembling child.
No more.
I’m rewriting my own story, turning helplessness into control.
Victimhood into mastery.
In Haven’s corruption,theirruination, I’ll find my salvation.
My sister’s butterfly—just like Sybil herself—deserves freedom, even if that freedom comes through destruction.
Haven and Kai deserve the same mercy…as do I.
I unplug my phone from its charger, struggling to focus bleary eyes on the screen as it starts up. Notifications and missed calls scroll over the page, but I ignore them all, tapping out a message to my dear friend Chris.
There’s only one thing that’ll dig me out of this hole—a rail fat enough to make Freud call his mother. Followed by some light stalking, just for the hell of it.
Saturday night, Greek Row? Bound to be a party or three.
