Page 41 of Darkest Descent

But there was movement in the air down there, something that raised my hackles, had my instincts firing off wildly. Something was wrong. I don’t know why, but my body was sending me warning signals, a sense of dread. I grabbed Asher’s hand.

With my heart in my throat, Asher gave my palm a squeeze and let go, stepping into the basement while I flicked the light switch on this side of the door.

There was a beat. A suck in of air.

“Shit!” Asher roared, fraught, racing into the room without me. “Hunter!”

For a second, I locked up, scared of what I’d see, terrified of what new horror I was about to witness. But when Asher bellowed for me, his voice harrowing, I moved, making it into the basement only a few seconds behind him.

And what I found made my heart fucking stop.

Hunter had hung himself.

His body swung from the beam he’d tied me to in our darkest moments.

His face was red and purple.

Straining. Bulging eyes. Even the injured one had pressure building behind it as he scrambled.

It wasn’t too late.

“Hunter!” I cried, flying into action and grabbing the chair he must have used to get higher, now knocked out from under him. I climbed it, shoving a frozen Asher out of the way to reach for Hunter’s neck. My fingers struggled to dig into the rope around his neck so he could suck in a breath, but it was too fucking tight. His eye strained, blood filling the healthy one, as he watched me fight to save him, his eyes so full of fucking life it wasn’t fair. “Please don’t,” I begged him. We weren’t through. “This isn’t done, Hunter. I need you. Please help me.” My voice was a low, desperate husk as I forced a finger between his neck and the rope, the threads burning me as I grew more and more frantic, ignoring the pain.

He couldn’t die. Not now. Not when we were so close.

Asher wrapped his arms around Hunter’s legs and lifted him, allowing enough slack for me to make the noose bigger, loosening it. I worked fast, my gaze darting back to Hunter’s every half-second to ensure he was still watching me. His eyes told a story I didn’t want to hear.

It felt like too long. Way too long. But when I yanked the rope over his head and he slumped onto me, his breath was like a song against my cheek. We tumbled backward, Asher catching our legs and lowering us in a mess to the floor.

I didn’t want Hunter to die. Despite all of it, I wanted him here with us. He couldn’t go before we’d healed.

Asher helped me settle him onto the nearest mattress, and my heart was in my throat when Hunter reached for us, his limbs heavy as I batted him away. He looked forlorn for a moment, trying to gulp and open his mouth to speak, but I shook my head.

“Just breathe,” I told him. “Slow and steady.” I settled behind him and pulled his head onto my lap. “Asher, please get some water and some painkillers… and a phone or tablet or whatever the fuck, I need to google what to do.”

Asher nodded, and after pausing at the door to watch us for a moment, like he was confirming we were both okay, he sloped off. I hadn’t used my phone since we got them back. I had no desire to see what, if anything, was being reported about us. If my friends had contacted us. But this was important.

Looking down, I found Hunter’s gaze burning up at me. His eye strained bright red, veins burst all through the white, matching the one I’d stabbed. His neck was raw with rope burn, and there were seeping slices on his forearms, like he’d hacked away at himself before trying to take his own life. All the things he’d done to us… had it caught up with him at last? The shame? The grief? No. That was unacceptable.

“You aren’t allowed to die until you’ve repented, Hunter,” I told him, stroking his cheek. “You can’t go until I say you can.”

He gulped and managed a nod, his eyes telling me so much. I thanked whichever god floated around out there that he was still breathing, that we hadn’t been too late. For all he’d done to us, it was a miracle I felt grateful for his life, but I did.

We had plans.

Hunter started to talk when Asher hurried back into the room, a bag over his shoulder, a glass of water and Hunter’s phone in his tight grasp. Water sloshed over the rim of the glass as his hands shook. “It says to perform CPR, but he’s breathing…” Asher gasped, his eyes darting around in panic.

“Hand it over,” I asked, motioning for the device before he had a meltdown. “Help me give him some sips of water and I’ll find some proper advice.”

Turns out, there isn’t much to be done after saving someone from hanging. Either they’re dead or they aren’t. Hunter was still breathing, hadn’t lost consciousness, so it was a case of waiting out the ligature marks and the internal bruising. He would heal with rest and patience. He could breathe, make small noises, so there were no crushing injuries either. Just time needed.

“I’m sorry,” Hunter grunted out two days later, when we’d all piled into his bed, eating the last of the ice cream and watching a movie. The ice cream gave me flashbacks of how it felt being shoved inside me, but I moved past it. Fuck giving up ice cream. This was rocky road, too, and based on the stains on the floor, the one Hunter’d used as lube was vanilla based. But maybe one day in the distant future I would shove an entire pint of rocky road up Hunter’s hole, or something with lots of chunks and shards of chocolate.

Asher paused the movie, and we both turned to our big brother, surprised to hear his voice. It was husky, but clear.

“You don’t need to apologize for that,” I muttered, my eyebrows drawn together. “You—”

Hunter shook his head and forced himself to sit up higher, pushing away our attempts to help. “I’m not apologizing for trying to… kill myself.” He winced. “I’m apologizing for taking your trust again. For what happened.”

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