Page 40 of Boy of Ruin
She doesn’t wait. She just walks off, heads down the hall and up the stairs.
A moment later, I hear the door slam.
I wonder how long it’ll take for me to put my hands on her, because I meant what I said, despite my apology. She’s fucking testing me.
And when hours pass and we decide to talk again, it gets worse.
I throw a glass against the wall, watch it splinter into pieces.
She misses him. This morning, she told me she doesn’t want our child, and just now, she’s fucking telling me she misses him.
Over and over and fucking over.
Now she’s standing beside the wall I just threw my rocks glass at, her face pale, her body stiff, every muscle in her small frame coiled with tension.
That could’ve hit her.
We both know it.
Doesn’t matter that she’s thrown a wine bottle at my head before. That was…before we were together. Before we were married. That’s a line I shouldn’t have fucking crossed but I can’t seem to stop.
I glance at the lines of coke on the table that she started yelling at me about. Then I hear it again, in my head. How much she misses him. How she just wants to “check on him.”
“Sid, I’m sorry, I—”
“This is why now isn’t the right time,” she snarls at me, her eyes narrowed, throwing back her words about wanting an abortion in my face. “We can’t have a child. We can’t even have a fucking conversation. Fuck you, Lucifer.”
I hear him in the dark.
His voice, so like mine, whispering words of damnation to me. To her. To our child. My fingers tremble, clenched tight around my glass, the ice clinking against the sides. I downed the drink moments ago, but I need another one.
I need another one.
I need her.
Her, her, her.
It’s always fucking been her.
But he’s here. Whispering to me. And it isn’t real. I know it isn’t real. He’s dead, buried in an unmarked grave behind Sanctum. But right now, it doesn’t matter that he’s a fucking corpse. Right now, he’s in my head and he’s in my fucking room at our house, and I—
“Luce?” a voice whispers in the dark.
I flinch, sloshing the ice and the dregs of my drink over the edge of the cup as I leap out of bed, my heart racing. My eyes try to adjust to the darkness, but I can’t see anything and now I hear him all over again.
“You’re nothing. You are nothing. You will never be anything. Pammie never touched you, Lucifer. What woman in their right mind would want you , when they could have me?”
“Lucifer?” that other voice whispers and I back against the bed, my hand shaking so violently that the glass slips from my fingers, hits the floor with a thud, ice spilling across the hardwood.
But it didn’t shatter.
At least it didn’t shatter like that glass I threw at Sid’s head.
My chest caves as my father’s whispers grow louder. I clamp my hands over my ears, my pulse thudding too fast in my chest. The blow, and the memories, and the fear and disgust have my heart palpitating.
Stop.
I say it in my head, over and over, trying to hold onto something that’s real. My wife. Her love for me. She loves me. I know she loves me. She ran because she loves me. Because she loves our child and she won’t let him…she would never let him take that from me. From us. She’d never…
