Page 90 of Kings of Seduction

But what could I have said except, ‘I did this... I caused this,’ my lips relentlessly murmuring the words throughout the ceremony while Ferris and Cole were pleading with me to keep quiet.

Brax wasn’t there. He was much busier securing the perimeter and making sure everything developed without any incidents, while I felt that I was the one who could cause an incident. I was like a ticking time bomb in danger of setting off at every moment. I didn’t even know what I was doing anymore, constantly oscillating between regret, painful grief, and a strange sense of justice.

I knew I wasn’t directly responsible for her death.

I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.

But I was the one who let her stand in front of my bullet.

I was the one who should be in the coffin, in her place.

I don’t even know what really happened during the hour we were there. Just copied speeches, echoing between the cathedral’s walls just so that the words would get lost between the bricks.

She was dead, and that was the only thing that mattered. I perfectly understood that the instant we abandoned the building and stepped outside.

The clouds were so dark that I was beginning to think it was night, as if the sky itself was grieving her death. The whole atmosphere was hazy, like a dark dream that I couldn’t escape from was coming to life.

A few guys, including Thomas and Darrel, carried her coffin, walking on what seemed to be a path of thorns, which was painfully carving each one of their steps in the back of my mind.

I remember I was shaking when they finally stopped. The view that spread before me was foretelling the doomed feeling that was about to engulf me. Not that I didn’t feel that way every second, ever since she’d been murdered, but the tiny drops of rain filling the air were making me realize that the time to say the last goodbye was closing in on me.

We finally stopped in front of a pit that seemed to have run down into an endless abyss. I thought I knew pain by then, but the image of her family flooding the ground with their crystal tears was tearing my soul into shreds. They were reminding me of myself on the day of my mother’s funeral. I would have done anything so that she would have stayed... I would even have traded places with her so that she would have stayed.

Jenna seemed so peacefully still, so opposed to what was going on inside of me. I felt I would puke from the pain. I felt I was going to scream until no voice would be left within me.

My responsibility.

My fault!

Despite the thoughts that were driving me one step away from madness, on the surface, I was numb, unable to speak. Maybe unable to even breathe.

I had no idea what was happening around me. I couldn’t even tell when they lowered the coffin or when I threw the last hand of dirt over it. I just knew I couldn’t be there any longer.

The dark sky.

The sea of people that came to say goodbye.

The hypocrisy of the Elite, only present there to please my kings.

Too much for me to bear.

‘I’m going to take care of her family. They’ve been through enough.’ Ferris snuck from behind me just when I was about to leave.

I knew that he had good intentions, and I also knew what this kind of support would mean for anyone living in the Pit. However, the maddening guilt was preventing me from even thinking straight or from taking Ferris’s own traumas into consideration.

I was a blubbering idiot and acting exactly like one. ‘How could that bring a life back? How could that bring Jenna back?’ I yelled at him, knowing that he would never have the right answer to that.

‘Nothing would bring her back, but nothing gives you the right to leave with her. We still need you here.’ His words were cold and warm at the same time, sharing his pain altogether with his love.

Maybe we could have gone on with the conversation, and maybe he would have stopped me from my path, but fate never lets you escape the unavoidable.

I noticed Brax’s men gathering around him for who knows what plan he needed to share with them, while a gesture of my mobster’s finger made Ferris leave my side and join him. ‘I’ll be right back.’ The worried look on his face shouldn’t have been ignored. Yet, I ignored it completely, being too distracted by my own suffering.

Slithering between the crowd, I managed to walk away without anyone seeing me. The bodyguards, including my own, were distracted by Brax, while the rest of the crowd couldn’t care less about where I was heading.

I just drifted away through imposing tombstones.

The creme of the Elite was lying in that ground.

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