18
Chapter Eighteen
SIN
There is light pouringinto the room, filling every dark inch that surrounded us minutes ago. Each of my senses slowly awakens and I close my fingers over the thin bed sheet, sweeping my arm further to the side, attempting to find what I’m looking for. Her.
I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want to see what I’m going to see. If I inhale, I will smell linen, not her. I can still taste her, though. The sweetness of her skin still remains on my tongue, as I hope it will forever.
Footsteps in the hall startle my eyes open, facing the truth, facing nothing, an empty half of the bed. I sit up like a jackknife, looking around for a hint that she is still here somewhere, but her clothes and boots are gone. Jumping from the bed, I push the bathroom door open, stepping inside and yanking the shower curtain down from the rod.
She’s gone.
I don’t understand what the motivation was to leave me and go back out there, dropping herself into a pit of people who want her dead. We could have waited out the next twenty-five years. Together.
She has been in my life for such a short period of time, but I feel like I’ve known her longer than anyone else in my life.
I couldn’t leave her the way she has left me.
I pull on my pants and slip my shirt over my head, leaving my socks and shoes behind as I rush through the door. It takes me less than a few minutes to find the glass exit—the gates to hell.
With my hands pressed up against the cold glass, I rest my forehead down, letting tear after tear make its way down my cheek. She left me. My girl fucking left me. My girl.
A hand on my back forces me upright and I turn to find Locke. “I’m sorry,” he says. “She insisted on leaving.” I can punch this guy in the face; call him a traitor and an asshole for letting her leave like she did, but then I would be acting like Mom. “I gave her weapons, food, water, things to help her survive.”
“It won’t matter what she has once she comes face to face with those fucking lunatics,” I tell him.
“I’m sorry,” Locke says. “Let me know if I can do anything for you.” I shove my fist into the glass window, embracing the pain wrenching through my arm. It hurts less than my chest does right now.
Locke walks back in the direction he came from and I push off the glass window, stomping back down to the empty apartment. The thoughts fighting in my head are bouncing back and forth between telling me to go after her, or wait here for her.
“She’s the Juliet,” Mom’s voice replays in my head. I am nothing more than a man who would want to kill the Juliets, seeking my freedom back. Mom created a war most of us cannot fight. She created a war designed to kill all involved.
Reese is wrong, patient zero or not, she won’t be given the time she needs to convince them to listen to her. Do they even have the ability to listen to her? Most of them are lost in some sub-reality within their minds, and I don’t know if outside influences can break through that, no matter who they are. I wish she would have listened to me but now she could already be dead.
Maybe it’s best if I assume she is.
This wasn’t her destiny, though. It wasn’t. Her decision was made by the Juliet inside of her, inducing self-destruction. No one could combat that, not me, not the Reese she was born to be.
I may not be a Juliet, but that doesn’t mean my heart won’t self-destruct, leaving me here, mindless, facing a real nightmare, enduring what my imagination can conjure up, assuming the worst, believing the worst, and never reaching my happy ending. The difference is, I won’t die from a broken heart, I’ll be forced to live in pain, alone, left with my cycling thoughts that will forever haunt me.
