Page 73 of Devilish Ink

“I know.”

“Andhim.”

“I know,” I said quieter still.

“Are you sure youlovelove her?” he asked. “It’s not just…ye know, lust?”

I watched myself bleed. The slow, steady line of my blood along my thumb. I’d bleed myself dry for Ryleigh. Without saying a word aloud, Darren seemed to understand my response. Know it instinctually.

“Kayleigh was with my brother first,” he said. “And my brother loved her. Or at least, he thought he did. Got a ring and everything.”

I’d never heard Darren say so much with such an open countenance. Somehow, somewhere, we’d become friends.

“Shite,” I muttered.

Darren crossed his ankles, leaned back on the corner of the desk. Before continuing he drew a hand over his face. As if he could still remember the pain. Still feel its lingering scars.

“If I could have forgotten Kayleigh, I would have,” he said, pushing up the brim of his baseball cap. “If I could have moved on from her somehow…hell, if I could have run away from Dublin… It would have ripped out my heart, but it would have been easier. Less painful.”

Darren shrugged and I saw what I felt mirrored in his eyes.

“But you couldn’t,” I said in a soft voice.

“Not a chance in hell I could ever stop loving her,” Darren said.

He pulled out a bandage and tore it open for me. Crumbled the packaging into the wastepaper basket. He left half a black thumbprint at the sticky corner of the bandage as he handed it to me.

I didn’t need to thank him with words. In fact, I think he might have gone out for the pipe to cut me again if I did.

The wound stung when I pressed the bandage into place. But there was no way around it.

It had to hurt before it healed.

I took the stairs to Rian’s door two at a time. My head was so thick from tossing and turning that I couldn’t remember whether Ry normally left first or whether it was Rian. Or whether they left together. It was all a mad jumble.

I no longer cared. My desperation to see Ry, to hold her hands to my chest and spill my guts to her was so intense that I pounded on the door without any idea who would open it: the brother who hated me or the woman I needed to love me.

I heard footsteps just on the other side of the door. I accepted my fate as the door opened.

It was the first time I’d looked Rian in the face since our father’s disastrous funeral.

That flame of hatred ignited behind his pale blues, the colour of our ma’s eyes. Rian was too young when she died to know that her eyes never burned like his.

Rian stood there, chest heaving, fingers shaking on the handle. I stood there unmoving and let his eyes dissect me.

“Rian,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse like I hadn’t spoken for years. I supposed in a way, I hadn’t. “Hey, I’m—”

“What the fuck do you want, Liam?”

This was what I had come to Dublin for. To have a chance to speak to Rian. To make things right. To clean a black soul.

But it felt like all I’d done was taken his place as the drug addict. My skin pale, my attention fading in and out, my head somewhere else. I needed Ry. I needed Ry like a needle in my vein. I was going through withdrawals from her. I couldn’t see my brother through the fog. I could only feel my own fire-burning pain.

“You look great,” I said, rambling. “Well, I mean better than—”

“Fuck off. I don’t need your platitudes.”

I couldn’t do this with Rian. Not yet. I had to speak to Ryleigh first.

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