37
KANE
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve watched the final moments of Kid’s life. I still watch it as my eyes sting from how raw they are.
“End it all,” he croaks through the speaker while the woman tries to take the blade from him.
“Just stop. I don’t want to hurt you,”she pleads back.
The sound is distorted on its journey through my grief. I still watch. I watch him beg her to kill him. I watch her do it. I watch the exact moment I lose him. And I scrub it back to watch the timestamp of him leaving our room.
The difference between me seeing him try on his clothes with his face lighting up and me dressing his cold, lifeless body was exactly eighty-four seconds. Eighty-four seconds changed my life. It’s such a fucking arbitrary number, eighty-four seconds. He left the room eighty-four fucking seconds before I came back. He died while I was looking for him in our room, while I was here in this fucking building.
Eighty-four seconds, and we’d still be together.
Nothing significant should happen in such a small amount of time. I couldn’t even make a coffee, for fuck’s sake. I try to gothrough everything I did that would have gotten me back here eighty-four seconds earlier.
If I spent less time talking to Niko?
If I didn’t search the stores for everything butterfly-related?
If I wasn’t so indecisive about which pajamas he’d prefer?
It all comes back to the same thing. If I didn’t go to see Delilah, he would be here. I would have walked into this room while he was taking photos. Before Rowan disturbed him. Before I broke my promise.
If I didn’t go to Delilah, he would be here. He’d be safe, and I’d never know how fucking life-altering eighty-four seconds can be. I’d watch my beautiful boy smiling at the butterflies. His face wouldn’t have fallen. He wouldn’t have thought a promise meant that I would leave. I’d have him.
Eighty-four seconds ruined my life, and ended his.
Three days without him.
I don’t even know who the fuck I am anymore. My hands are cold, my chest is colder, but I stop the recording of his death as I go into the ones where he was full of life. My lashes stick to my cheek when the video loads, then his small, shy smile is in front of me.
“I like that one.” He points at the frame around his face as he sits on the bed. “It looks like it has eyes.”
The bed he slept on is with the woman who took him from me. She did what he asked for by killing him, but she didn’t hurt him like the others. He was smiling at her while she did it. She rocked him, held his hands through his last painful breaths. More importantly, she tried to cover his naked body. In some backwards, fucked up way, she showed him more compassion than anyone else, so I gave her the fucking bed and any non-perishable food I could find in the canteen when Lennox tried to force me to eat.
I’ve got his pillow though. I’m terrified of touching it, so I stare at it as I lay on my side. I place my phone directly below it to feel like he’s here, talking about his butterflies again.
“Little shadow,” Lennox says softly.
“Fuck. Off.”
Kid must have pressed something on the screen because the camera switches to show his feet in my socks. He giggles when he notices it looks like the butterflies are sitting on his toes. I miss his small giggles. I miss the way he’d hold my hand. Now I can’t sleep without his knuckles under my thumb. I miss how my socks would roll down to his ankles because they were too big. I could always hear them rustling whenever he’d move his feet. I miss who I was when I had him.
“He has returned,” Lennox whispers.
I roughly wipe my eyes with one hand as I carefully lift my phone from the floor and place it in my pocket. Rowan fucked off like a coward. Any planning or biding my time is pointless now. I just need him dead.
But Lennox blocks the door and holds my shoulders. “You can make him hurt. Youwilldo it. Not like this, when you’re angry, or you’ll make a mistake.”
Cocking my arm back, I swing. He remains unmovable while I use the full force of my despair to slam into his ribs.
“Killing him will only put me in his place, little shadow. Ruin them all.”
His calm voice is pissing me off, so I punch harder. “I don’t give a fuck about you. This is your fucking fault. You said the door would be locked! You fucking said it!”
He wraps his arm around my shoulders, dragging me into his chest as he cups the back of my head. “I know I did. It was supposed to work.”
