Page 45 of The Pretty Psycho

"I'm not doing anything," I said, but I knew I was. I was hurting him—hell, I was hurting us both because I wanted nothing more than to hide in his arms and wait for the storm to pass. But that's not how I was wired. Hiding was not part ofmy genetic code, but maybe I really did need some time away from everyone and everything to lick my wounds. "We're not together." I pushed that dagger a little bit deeper, hurting him with every single word, because even without saying it I knew what he wanted from me. "We're not anything."

He stumbled backward as if I'd struck him, his eyes wide and his face pale.

"Come on, Yo." I turned toward her, as she kept observing the interaction between us with equal parts shock and something else I couldn't quite put my finger on. "Get me out of here."

She didn't think before grabbing my hand and leading me toward the dorm building that hadn't burned down, taking me away from the man that made me feel too much. The man that for all his mistakes was probably the best damn thing to happen to me, if only I knew how to let him in.

14

VEGA

"What the fuck was that?"was the first thing that came out of Yolanda's mouth the moment we stumbled inside her room, breaking the silence we were enveloped in the past couple of minutes.

What the fuck, indeed.

The moment we split from the group, we practically ran toward her room as if the hounds of hell were after us, but considering that Adrian was more stubborn and more determined than the hounds of hell, I guess we had a reason for that.

I couldn't erase the hurt I saw in his eyes, nor could I erase the fact that I deliberately hurt him just because I didn't know how to deal with everything I was currently feeling. I felt like a walking bipolar disorder—one moment I was completely fine, ready to take on the day, and the next it was as if the claws of desperation started scratching over my throat, closing their long talons around my windpipe until it was too hard to breathe.

I wanted to meet the rest of The Brotherhood. I wanted to be included in all the plans that would no doubt start getting developed tonight, but I couldn't face them. Standing there in front of the main building, faced with all of them, made me wantto hide and never come back out. It definitely didn't help that Adrian could see right through the facade I was trying to put out, asking me that one question I fucking hated hearing.

"I panicked," I said, collapsing on top of her bed right next to the window, staring at the ceiling above us. "I fucking panicked." And I hated myself for it.

I fought against men double, hell, triple my size. I went through life all alone, with no family and no friends. I fought against those goons in the hospital while still in this fucked-up state, yet I couldn't take the way Adrian was looking at me. I couldn't let him in no matter how much I wanted to, because I didn't know how.

Because no one had ever taught me how to trust people. No one had ever taught me how to love, how to feel emotions in a healthy way.

"Did you really mean it?" Yolanda asked as she sat down next to me. "That you don't trust him?" I turned toward her, seeing genuine concern in her eyes.

"I don't know," I murmured. And I didn't know.

I had no name for what I was feeling. I had no explanation for my behavior, and I really, really hated myself for acting like a fucking child when I was anything but.

"I don't know if I can trust him," I admitted out loud what had been heavily pressing on my mind since we came back from the hospital. "I want to," I whispered. "I want to trust him. I want to let him in. I want to be normal, but I don't know how."

"Because of what he did?"

"No." I shook my head, lifting myself to a seated position. "Because of who I am." And that was the truth, wasn't it?

The Schatten didn't just destroy the childhood I could've had, they also destroyed my trust in people, and then Tyler stomped on it for good measure. They destroyed any possibility of ever having a normal relationship with another person because Ididn't know how. I was raised to be a soldier, a killer, a machine built to be used by other people.

I wasn't raised to enjoy the nicer things in life. I wasn't raised to fall in love or to know how to process emotions. That's one of the reasons they taught us how to shut it all off. How to be as unfeeling as they wanted us to be, because feelings could turn messy, and the last thing they wanted was an emotional bunch of soldiers who couldn't deal with the monstrosities they'd committed.

Unfortunately, once I opened that lid on all my emotions, I didn't know how to push them back in. They weren't listening to me anymore, because I was no longer in control. My heart refused to be tamed, because it too knew that I couldn't live my life the way I used to, only feeling what I deemed necessary to feel.

"I didn't have a chance to tell you why I came to the Academy," I murmured, looking straight at her. She frowned, her eyes falling to the bed. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want to lose the only friend I had."

She smiled softly before looking back up at me. "I think that somewhere between your arrival and the fact that you already knew how to fight almost as good as Adrian and the rest of them, I realized you weren't just an ordinary student. I had no idea what or who you were, but something told me we weren't on the same level."

"No," I laughed, "we definitely weren't, and I'm not saying this because I'm trying to be rude."

"Oh, you're not." She chuckled. "Trust me, I would never be able to fight like you do."

"And you don't want to," I mumbled. "Because fighting the way I fight didn't come lightly. I wasn't born into this world, Yolanda. Hell, I was never meant to be a part of it, but after theylocked my mom in prison, an organization took me in, turning me into what I am today."

"A fighter."

"No, a monster." She frowned, obviously hating that word, but it was the truth. She said it herself not so long ago, and I knew where I belonged. Earth was filled with people like me. People who wanted to do better, but we couldn't. "I killed, I maimed, I tortured people. Sometimes innocent people. Sometimes not-so-innocent ones." She kept looking at me, soaking in every single word. "I've traveled all around the world, and if you asked me which city was my favorite one I wouldn't be able to tell you. But if you asked me which city had seen the biggest number of my attacks, then I would tell you London. If you wanted to know which city haunted me the most, I would tell you Beijing. If you asked me which country had seen the worst of me, I would tell you the United Arab Emirates." I took a deep breath, remembering all those screams, all the pleading, all the tears rolling down the cheeks of those I was sent to kill. "Most people counted their days in minutes and hours, I counted mine in the number of kills I had. And I was fine with what I was for such a long time that I failed to see what I was becoming. I forgot the sound of my mother's voice. I forgot the color of her eyes. I forgot every single thing, because I liked being a monster. I. Liked. It."

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