Page 24 of Ricochet

Because as I stare down at the paper half colored in red, I realize whose skull he was painting with blood.

I was only eighteen at the time. While I was always careful, disposing of or thoroughly cleaning murder weapons and not leaving any fingerprints behind, I think there was one big mistake I might’ve made.

I hadn’t thought of the repercussions of killing the man in his own home, of letting Callum find his stepdad dead in the kitchen.

All that blood.

Half his face gone.

The man who raised him.

How badly did I fuck him up?

Stone saw me.Again.

But this time was different.

This time, I’m not sure what it is he saw. Or what hethinkshe saw.

Because the truth is my deepest, darkest secret.

If I’m lucky, all he thinks he saw was weakness again. The poor, scared little boy who found his stepdad brutally murdered in the middle of the night. The horror-stricken, traumatized version of me I probably should be after an experience like that.

The truth is that’s not who I am at all.

I still have trauma, sure. The nightmares and shadows are proof of that. But that’s for an entirely different reason.

I hated Stone when he saw how weak I was because Iwasweak. Now, Ihopethat’s all he saw. The lie to cover up the truth.

As I sit in the center of my bed with my legs crossed, I’m surrounded by loose pages from multiple different sketchbooks I’ve owned over the years. They all show the same image, drawnover and over. The same picture I drew five years ago while sitting on those steps, staring down at my stepdad’s corpse.

Some are more zoomed in, details of his mutilated face drawn in intricate lines. His one open, lifeless eye peering up from the page, the other so mangled it looks like a mess of scribbles. Flesh and fat and tendons hanging off in shreds. Scraps of a man who was hardly human.

The real truth of what Stone was looking at when our eyes were locked?

I loved it.

I loved it too fucking much.

Not just the death but the beautiful brutality of it. The raw freshness of it. The way the blood sparkled in the dim light, how the scent of it settled deep in my lungs. The violence. The sense of a life leaving this plane, shuffling off its mortal coil.

I wanted to draw it again. I wanted to use that outline figure of the skull to copy all the horrific details, the red pencil to shade it in with blood.

So that’s what I did when I got home this afternoon. The new sketch lies in front of me, covered in even more red than my lab assignment was when I came out of whatever had taken hold of me.

As I stare down at it, I realize it’s not as satisfying as it once was.

The deeper truth is that I want to do more than justdrawit. I want toseeit again, experience it again. Not even my stepdad’s death. Just…death.

I’ve wanted that so badly for the past five years that I’ve thought about—

I slam my sketchbook shut, trapping those dark ruminations within its pages.

I’mnotthat person.

I’ll never give into that particular darkness inside of me.

I can’t even think about it without having a fucking panic attack.

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