Page 104 of Deviant Illusions

Kane turns with a bewildered expression on his face as he shakes his head. I laugh. I can’t help it because this can’t be fucking real. I also have my father’s pathetic features stuck in my mind. The fear, how his face fell, the shock of Helene’s stick splitting his lip, it’s all there on a loop as I pull the sheets over my head while I continue laughing and try to hide from the world.

“What are these for?” Kane asks. I peer over the edge of the sheet, watching Anna silently hand him two garment bags.

Her betrayal hurts more than my parents’. Probably because she’s the one who actually raised me, alongside Ruby. She came to work for my family when I was a baby and I remember thinking she was my mom, then secretly wishing she was when I was corrected. But now she doesn’t look at me or address the fact that this is all insane. She goes along with whatever Helene tells her to do. She kept everything from me too. At any point throughout my teenage years, she could have sat me down and explained that this family is fucked, to run, but she didn’t. Shechose silence and servitude instead of helping me when I would do my utmost to be the outlet of my mother’s rage so that Anna was unharmed.

There’s blood staining Kane’s sweats when he turns around, seeping through the material in little dots above his crotch, but there are bloody fingerprints too. I can’t recall a time that I’ve ever been more attracted to him. It may be due to not actually knowing him before this moment. I put him on a pedestal, someone innocent and incapable of harm because that’s who I needed him to be. In return, he did the same with me. He believed I was good, deserving of peace. We both only saw what we needed in those moments.

Now, we’re forced to see things as they are, the true depths of how fucked up the other is. But it just adds more facets to his personality, contrasting against the lighter parts to the point that they’re even brighter. Someone who’s kind all the time isn’t choosing to be, that’s just their baseline. So new-Kane, who is covered in tattoos and scars with blood on his skin, was choosing to be kind. Even when he was Ghost, he had moments where he would show little sparks of kindness.

He doesn’t mention the argument we had as he lays the garment bags on the bed then turns the lights on. Fuck. The muted light from the door didn’t show just how bloody he is, but it’s all over him. All over the sheets that I’m currently hiding behind too.

“Truce?” he asks, running his fingers through his hair.

“In front of them?” I amend.

Taking a deep breath that pushes his chest out in a way that I should not find attractive, he nods once then holds his hand out to me. I stare at it.

“Delilah, I’m just helping you up.”

I slide out from under the sheet, avoiding his hand, and stiffly nod. “I know, but I can do it alone.”

We keep space between us as we stand at the foot of the bed and open the garment bags. One has a suit, the other a long, black lace dress. There’s a note pinned to the suit and Kane tilts his head to read it instead of picking it up.

I do the same for no other reason than having something else to look at that isn’t him.

You will be collected in fifteen minutes. Be dressed and clean.

Weird freaks.

But he acts more human as he gives me a boyish smile that resembles the Kane I knew. “Blood won’t go with the suit, pretty girl. Do you think we can keep our truce while we shower?”

“We can do that separately.”

“Nope, it says fifteen minutes,” he says, tapping the note. “That’s not enough time.”

I brush past him and go into the bathroom, pull my hoodie off, then step into the shower before I’ve even turned it on. He can get fucked if he thinks I have to touch him. I don’t trust myself not to be weak. When he acts like my Kane, I want nothing more than to wrap myself in him, to lose myself, but the illusion isn’t worth it. Not when he’ll change at a moment’s notice, not when I’ll lose parts of myself when he eventually pushes me away.

The icy water pelts my skin as I turn the lever for the water. Kane steps into the shower behind me, providing a barrier as he wraps his arms around me. He kisses my shoulder so softly that if it wasn’t for the difference in temperature between my cold skin and his warm lips, I wouldn’t feel it all. The water slowly warms as he buries his nose into the crook of my neck and I have to lean into him to hear him whisper, “They know what happensin that room, what we talk about and what we do. The worse I treat you, the safer you are, but I do not hate you. I will not hurt you.”

“Did you lie?” I whisper back.

“Did you?” he says even lower. “Did you lie when you took the only thing I had to comfort me away? Hate me now, hate me for the rest of your life, but let me have the past where you loved me. Please, koukla mou.”

I don’t say anything and close my eyes as I wash the blood off my skin.

“I don’t need you to love me,” he whispers. “Not now or again, but I need to know that you loved me once. That all those times you would lay on my chest were true. So, I’m asking you the same thing you always asked me. I’m giving you that same power. Was it real, Delilah?”

My heart beats erratically, adding more sounds to drown us out as I lie, “No.”

He stills at my back, his fingers trembling against my hip. The water is bearable now, unlike the man behind me. Why the fuck do I care about his feelings when he didn’t care about mine? If he loved me, truly loved me, he would never have thought of hurting me. No lies would make a difference, no manipulation or time apart either. Yet he did. He used that time to plan an elaborate scheme with only one goal in mind—causing me as much pain as possible.

Kane takes over, lathering shower gel over my hands, scrubbing his blood off my fingertips and hiding his promises beneath the sound of the spray like I didn’t just crush us both.

“As soon as we can run, we’re going. I’ll get you out of here even if it kills me. Then you’ll be happy and I’ll come back, find out what happened to your baby, and find you again.” He washes up my arms, down my chest, then flattens his palm on my stomach, repeating, “I’ll find out what happened. We’ll be afamily and I’ll keep you both safe.” I wash his forearms so I don’t hold his hand, but he keeps whispering, “In a perfect world, you’d both be mine.”

Peeling his arms off me, I press my shoulder to the glass shower panel and follow it out so I don’t have to listen to his shit. I can’t do it again, not when it took everything I had to drag myself out of that mental pit of missing a part of myself when everyone said it didn’t exist.

Would I be a good parent? Abso-fucking-lutely not.

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