Page 30 of Wild Angel

“Try, son,” he says. “Try.”

Chapter Eighteen

Nyx

Istare down at the piece of paper, not comprehending what I’m looking at. It could be the painkillers Savage fed me, or the fact that I’m still floating in and out of consciousness after the blackout I had yesterday.

Blackout? Ha.

That phrase makes me imagine a city’s lights shutting off in a wave that spreads from some invisible epicenter. High rises, apartments, shops. Darkness, like cancer, eating away at the light, leaving skeletal silhouettes behind.

“What is this?” I ask, not even bothering with a shrug.

Savage lets out a frustrated breath. He appears in my periphery, crouching beside the bed.

I’m in his room. Have been for over a day, I think. Time is too fuzzy for me to be sure especially since I don’t necessarily want to concentrate on the past right now.

I know I’ll only find misery there.

“These are the men that took your sisters.”

I brush my fingertips over a scrap of paper.

Martin Perez

Tavo Acosta

Daniel Ramos

“Mexicans.”

“Two Mexicans, one Colombian.”

I touch the paper again. “Where?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find—” He cuts off when I crumple the paper into a ball and let it fall out of my limp hand. Then I roll onto my side, turning my back on him, and pull the sheets up to my ear.

Savage makes a soft, angry sound in the back of his throat. This is usually the part where he leaves, slamming the door behind him.

It’s been like this since yesterday. He’d wake me, feed me more painkillers, try to get food down my throat, or try to talk to me, and I’d turn my back on him.

He’d get pissed off.

He’d leave.

And that’s perfect because it’s exactly what I want him to do.

I don’t want anyone around while I feel like this. Fuck, I can barely handle having people around when I’m strong. Now?

I’m weak inside. Torn up. Not really in a physical way, although that might be a possibility, but in some other way. What happened in that room with Sergio was the most violent, invasive,horrifyingthing I’ve ever experienced.

And I’ve had some fucking doozies in my life.

I wish I could say it haunts me, like my mother’s slow demise from cancer. But it doesn’t. It’s…intangible. My mind has locked it away somewhere far and deep.

But I can still feel its dark tendrils worming into my psyche.

I just want to be left alone until I stop feeling this way…or until I stop feeling at all.

---