Page 73 of Boy of Ruin
Silence stretches on for a moment, and I’m shivering under my shirt, wishing he’d leave. Hoping he doesn’t smell the stench of my urine. Wanting him gone as my face burns, my eyes sting with tears I refuse to fucking shed.
“This will help,” he finally says, and I want to know what he’s talking about, but I don’t dare look at him.
Or ever at them.
I’ve always been beneath them, the one with demon eyes made that very fucking clear.
“But do me a favor?”
My throat closes up, and his question finally makes me pry my eyes open, mine locking on his dark hazel ones. What could I possibly fucking do for him?
He smooths his hand over his gray shirt, looking down for a moment and swallowing, his throat bobbing.
After a tense moment where I want to scream at him, to tell him to get the fuck out, he meets my eyes again and he says, “When you get out…” He rakes his hand over his head, glances at the wall that separates my room from hers. “Don’t hurt her too.”
Without another word, he walks out.
My heart thrums painfully in my chest, pounding even in my temples, in my hollow stomach. I shift my gaze, see something on the white notebook, just beside the red line I etched into it.
A bobby pin.
And a box of matches.
I wake up in a cold sweat, breathing hard, scrambling against the headboard. Blinking open my eyes, I glance at the gun on my nightstand, but don’t reach for it. I don’t need to.
I’m safe here.
I’m not that same kid.
I’m not someone to hide when I hear footsteps. I don’t need fucking matches and bobby pins. A girl with blue eyes offering me breadcrumbs.
I’m not that person anymore.
Still, my hand comes to my ribs, and I feel the jagged scar against my hard muscles, my skin hot to the touch.
I think about how it felt, Lucifer plunging in that blade. Sinking it in deep and twisting. It was a type of pain I’d never known before, but I’d known plenty of other types, and I’m not even sure it compared.
It may have been worse than the physical pain I’d endured.
The twine around my wrists.
The hunger.
The kicking, the humiliation.
But even still, the only thing I could compare it to was that night I slit my wrists in a hotel bathtub, no one knowing where I was.
Her not knowing where I was.
How much I regretted what I did to her.
How much I hated that I was a monster, to the only girl I’ve ever fucking loved.
I close my eyes, try to relax against the headboard, but my fingers dig in deeper to my not-quite-healed scar, one hand fisting the sheets beside my hip.
I think about how it felt, keeping Sid safe under the covers at our mom’s house. When we heard moans and fighting and screaming and crying from outside my bedroom door.
One time I tied her wrists with shoestrings, because she wanted to run.
