Page 5 of Paper Thin Love

Boom!Damian stands suddenly, smashing the cheap chair into the hospital room wall. Then, moving like only Damian can, he’s in front of me, in a flash, his hand around my swollen throat.

It’s already a struggle to intake air but his fingers press, nails digging into my flesh, cutting slowly.

Oh shit! I did it.Provoked his demon and wounded his heart.

I didn’t mean to. I was just being selfish and wanted…a break. I wanted a reprieve from the pain, from the loss, the hole that will never be filled by either my mother or father. Dad’s been MIA since Mom’s funeral. He never returned home. Since our house comes with a staff and a full security team, he didn’t need to worry about me. His son. Someone else did. That someone else used to be my mom, but now it’s Martha. She means well, but she sure as shit isn’t mom.

“Damian,” Titan reaches for Damian’s shaking shoulders. I can see the fear on Titan’s face because if he had to rip Damian’s hand off me, he might not succeed until after I’m dead.

Damian is the quietest of us, but he’s the most deadly. He’s not a shark lurking in deep waters, waiting to attack you from beneath. He’s more like an Olympic god, silently waiting in the gray zones of a dark thundercloud, ready to unleash his fury and wipe out everything in his path.

“Cut him some slack.” Titan orders, his voice low and urgent.

“Literally,” I croak. I fail to reach up because my hand’s full of IVs; one rips out, and another snags on the bedsheet that’s made of rice paper.

“Damian.”

“Do it. I dare you. Take your life,” Damian says to me. His eyes? They don’t go dark; they turn into slits that resemble the welcome gates of hell.

“I’ll come for you. Hunt you down and make you wish you decided to inhale and exhale instead of quitting,” A tighter squeeze, cutting off my air. Then he releases me.

Air! Mixed with, yuck, that antiseptic scent. I blink away the burn in my eyes as he storms from the room.

Titan watches him leave, then hangs his head.“Is that what you wanted? To leave us?”

“No.”Yes.

“You can’t do that to him. To us,” Titan mutters; grief, regret and concern flash in his blue eyes.

I know. That exit plan was stupid and inconsiderate, especially to Damian. You see, his mom committed suicide. Damian was just a kid when he walked in on her with the knife still dug into her wrist, forming the long vertical slashes. She was in the bathtub at the time and hurried to slip her hand under the water. That is after she asked Damian to pull the knife out of her wrist.

What kind of mother asks her kid to take the knife out? To help her commit the crime?

Damian, being an innocent child, rushed to her side but, being a kid, he listened to his mom when she told him not to leave, to remove that fucking knife, and then to wait with her.

So he did.

He had no idea she was slowly dying or that the bath water had gone from vibrant red to a duller, deeper tone. He believed his mom when she said she was taking a nap and when she woke, she was going to be free. He believed her when she told him his future was his own to make and not to let others mold it for him.

All the King men are fucked in the head, but Damian…well, he’s bent and broken in different ways than Titan and I are.

The worst is that his dad blames him for his mom’s death. Not for her depression but for not running and alerting him that the bathwater was turning red and no longer clear. That his mom was killing herself right in front of her boy’s eyes.

Then here I am making a joke, okay, so a somewhat real joke, that I wanted to end my life.

“I fucked up. I was tired.”

“So you go to fucking sleep in your bed! You don’t risk your life!” Titan slams his fist into my mattress.

I look away at the dull cream walls.

“It was a cry for help. I know you; if you wanted to end it, you would have.” Titan’s voice fades, snuffed out like a candle. But his words linger in the air like the faint scent of smoke, slowly fading as it dissolves into the surrounding oxygen.

“The day you end things is not freedom. It’s a failure; it’s letting every monster devour you, letting every nightmare consume you. You’re a fucking King! You fight till the end; you don’t lay down and accept it.”

“I get it.” I gruff out. “It was a mistake. I get it!”

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

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