Page 28 of Vengeful Valentine

“You’re a fucking idiot. You both are.” Ace threw his phone at Silas, a specific video preloaded. “Watch that. I’m not leaving them alone any longer.” Ace began running across the clearing.

As soon as his fingers touched the doorknob…

Bang!

A gun shot rang out from inside.

Chapter 14

Hawk

Hawk kept his focus on Ashmine, watching her with an analytical intensity.

He tugged his shirt off, dropping it over her head. She struggled for a moment before covering herself with it.

Hawk didn’t want to see the marks Silas and Ace had left behind. Nor did he want to see the cigarette burns that littered her stomach, the long scars that came up over her shoulders. Gifts from Jerald.

“Do you believe in fate, Ashmine? Do you believe that maybe we were all too broken to ever be anything but wastes of space? That we all pretended to live these different lives, but at the end of the day we were meant to end up like this?” He reached forward, his knuckles brushing against her lips. “But don’t get me wrong, I’m angry with Silas and Ace too.”

He shoved his fist against her teeth, forcing her to open her mouth a bit. Her gaunt eyes stayed on his.

“Things are uncomfortable when made to do something they’re not used to.” He dropped his fist, hand falling to the gun between them.

Hawk cleared his throat, swallowing a few times before continuing.

“I wasn’t meant to be loved. I was meant to be used and abused and cast aside. And for a while I learned to live with that, but then you came along. You made me fall in love with you. You broke me apart. And when all was said and done, I tried to turn to Silas, but you had hurt him too badly and he ran from me too. I didn’t want to read the letters Ace sent. He wanted me to forgive you. But I couldn’t. You made usuncomfortable.Brothers shouldn’t be in love with theirsister.”

He gripped the gun with one hand and reached into his pocket with the other.

“A few months after you went away to the university. When Silas was gone. When Ace was behind bars. I bought this gun, I took it home with me. Back to the cabin we had all lived in before, except now I was alone. You all had given me a false sense of security.”

He lifted the gun, shoving it into her mouth this time. Forcing it as far into it as it could go.

She made a noise that soundedalmostlike a moan. But it couldn’t be. She wasn’t sick like they were. Ashmine couldn’t beenjoying this.

Her eyes were shut now as he choked her with the barrel.

He clenched his hand around the item from his pocket as he continued this story.

“I kept the gun with me at all times, with just one bullet in it. When life became too unbearable and the creeping loneliness threatened to drown me, I would flip a coin. If it landed on heads I told myself I would fire a shot. And I did. Over the course of a month I fired five shots. When I landed on heads the sixth time, when I still hadn’t heard from Silas, when Ace was still in jail, when you were still away at that school, I agreed with the coin. It was time. But unlike the other five times, when I pressed thegun against my temple and went to pull the trigger, this fucking bracelet distracted me.”

He threw the item in his hand at her, his attention shifting to her wrist, to the bracelet wrapped around it.

Why does she still wear it? A reminder of who she was?

She opened her eyes, whipping her attention down towards what he had tossed.

The puzzle bracelet she had given him years ago.

“I missed. Instead of dead, I was deaf. You kept me alive, kept me in my suffering even in your absence.”

He pushed the gun even further down her throat, and as she choked on it, he pulled the trigger.

Chapter 15

Ashmine

Life was short and then you died.

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