The turn of events life handed me were always going to have a profound impact, but this is something no one saw coming, not even me.
When I don’t answer, he continues, “Do you know how insane that sounds? I haven’t seen or heard from you in six years. Then I find you sneaking onto my rented property, with a fucking rifle, in the middle of the night, trying to take me out?”
“I didn’t know it was you! Someone we were looking for was there. We started it after…” My exhale shudders, taking away another truth I rarely voice. “We uncovered some type of secret society from university. All of them are hiding something, Saint. Every victim we found had the same thing that happened to Gina and me done to them.”
I battle with myself internally, watching the way his face constricts with each of my words.
“You…left without saying goodbye, and a year later, Gina and I started this.”
Saint flinches, but he skips over my revelation on what I’ve been doing with my life since he’s been gone.
“Are you serious?” He eyes me, the rise in his voice no longer there. He sounds…hurt.
An emotionally filled golf ball tries to dislodge itself down my throat when I swallow.
“I know I pushed you away. I’ve had to live with that regret every single day since, and the day I felt strong enough to not burden you with my darkness, you were already gone. I know it was selfish to expect you to wait for me during that time. But I…”
The rest of the words die off. I sound so fucking condescending.
It’s a mixture of anger, heartbreak, and pain.
Each of them I brought on by myself for what I did to us, thinking I was doing the right thing.
The moment I realised how truly wrong I was, that if I’d just worked on myself with him by my side.
I might never have darkened my entire soul beyond repair.
Saint could have likely talked me off the edge, saving Regina in the process, too.
But those days were dark, and nothing could have kept my head clear enough to see what I do now.
Not even him.
It’s a double-ended sword, because I like what I do.
I know that’s absolutely grounds to charge me as clinically insane, but being able to offer people like me a real method of justice? Not an ounce of regret seeps through my body.
It wouldn’t be right for us to only go after the two that hurt us, when there’s evidently an entire swarm of them.
His voice is barely above a whisper, to the point I almost missed it. I’ve never heard Saint’s voice sound so small.
“Didn’t you read the letter?”
My muscles tense up. “What letter?”
I move from the safety of the wall, daring myself to take a step closer to him.
His chest expands as he inhales, and I’m smacked once again with the intoxicating scent that is Saint.
“I wrote you a letter. I gave you my new number to contact me, and an address where you could write to”—he swallows, gaze shifting above my head before it locks with mine—“and whenever you were ready, I’d come back for you.”
My heart twists agonisingly inside my chest, like there’s barbed wire imbedding itself around it, the pricks penetrating through the muscle.
I didn’t receive a single sign that he even existed.
He’d vanished without a trace, leaving me living in a world tortured by his ghost, and the remorse for making the biggest mistake of my life.
I broke his heart, and his face when I spoke my last ever words to him tortures me more above anything else.
