Page 137 of Psycho Devils: Aran's Story 2

The collective betrayal had hurt worse than Mother lighting me on fire. Before then, my young brain had decided Mother was the villain and everyone else was nice. After I’d taken the test, the illusion disappeared.

Everyone could betray me.

Maybe it had been the increased isolation. Maybe it had been a chemical imbalance in my brain. Either way, after a week of everyone acting strange, I’d woken up to melancholy.

The world had been gray.

Ornate drapes had been pulled wide open, and two suns had filled the sky; rays had streamed across the lavish fabrics of my bedroom.

But my teeth had chattered from cold.

Everything had been steeped in shades of ashen blue. Colorless. One-dimensional and flat.

Servants’ faces had blurred around me as they spoke, and their words had been lost, because for the first time in my young life, time had warped and distorted around me.

Depression hadn’t slowly crept up on me like a wound left untreated. It hadn’t festered.

The haze had hit me like a bullet.

Numbness had ensconced my existence in a layer of impenetrable ice.

It had never left.

Back in the present, Jinx’s narrow shoulders shook back and forth as she sobbed in her brother’s arms.

When I was about her age, I’d also learned to suffer.

It was like staring in the mirror.

The acknowledgment made me feel profoundly uncomfortable in ways I couldn’t understand. There were limits to the conscious experience.

It had been a few hours in Sadie’s room, but it felt like days.

I stumbled away into the hall on shaky legs and barely noticed when Orion stood up from where he was waiting for me. He lunged for me.

Orion’s grip on my arm was the only thing that kept me from face-planting into the lightning that streaked down the walls.

I’d been so obsessed with my pain that I’d missed the signs.

A child under my care had suffered horribly, and I’d done nothing but whine about myself.

I keeled over and heaved liquids onto the marble floor.

Orion held my braids away from my face as he rubbed my back.

I pulled away from his touch.

The haze was becoming a vortex, and it was pulling me under.

Deeper.

Into the black.

Chapter 20

Orion

SWEETHEART

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