Page 76 of Body Tox

The nausea threatened me again, but I held it down, trying to steal my shaking hands.

I took a deep breath, laying the camera down on the wheel outside of the car, and getting to my knees on the cold, wet pavement. The concrete bit into my skin, and I welcomed the pain. My punishment for the horror I was about to commit.

I didn’t know if I wanted this baby, but I definitely never wanted its fate to be this. There were doctors. Medicines. Wait...

“Alex, there is medicine! I will take the medicine, and it will die.”

I felt hope bloom in my chest, the chance of my baby falling asleep peacefully to go back into the beyond they came from instead of being ripped apart.

Alex was silent. The eerie quiet stretched on until I had to crawl closer, unsure it was still there.

“Stupid girl,” he tsked. “I know there’s drugs, but that wouldn’t hurt like I want it to.”

I swallowed, and that bubble of hope disintegrated before my eyes.

“Get on with it,” he barked, slicing Cali’s top off her bloodied body.

I gripped the metal in my hand, wrapping the wires around my fist like a barbed glove. The long, jagged end, the sword that would end the life of an innocent and claim my soul along with it.

If I even survived this...

“I am…sorry.”

I spoke to the little life inside me, Cali, God, and my soul.

“Hey, you okay?” I jumped out of my skin. Asher’s soft touch jerked me back to reality.

“Uh...yeah,” I said, wiping the annoying ass tears from my face, dropping my hand from my useless stomach. I couldn’t have children after that night.

My actions hadn’t even mattered that night. After I ripped my soul from my body and lay in a puddle of my blood, cradling the innocent life, Alex drove Cali to where I was.

I was so weak I could only watch as she endured the torture that Alex wanted to give her. After he finished with her, he walked over to me and stabbed me directly in my stomach where that little baby had been, twisting and scarring me for life. He took not just one life but any lives my womb could ever have created.

As I bled out on the street beside my Cali, I heard him mock me.

The words had been swirling around my nightmares every night since.“A whore like you doesn’t ever deserve to be a mother. You’re as weak as your pathetic ass mama herself was. I should have used this blade to end her pathetic life way before.”

Some homeless person had called the ambulance to save my useless life, and I hadn’t seen Alex for years after that.

“Where are you at, Little Wraith?” Asher said, trying again to pull me from my past.

“I became an assassin to escape from him,” I said out loud. My voice sounded so much like that ghost of a girl I used to know.

Asher waited for me to continue, gently rubbing my arm like Cali used to do.

“She was a good person, you know,” I said absently, tracing his fingertips. “Cali was the one person in my life that wasn’t fake.”

He looked truly remorseful.

“Echo, I am so sorry. If I could take it back, I would.”

I believed that.

The fact that an assassin was apologizing for killing. Well…the irony wasn’t lost on me.

“He made me the monster I am.” My voice sounded so small, so weak.

Asher wrapped me in his arms. The tears I didn’t realize were there fell at that moment, soaking his bare chest.

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