Page 165 of Feed Your Fiends

“Please don’t go. I didn’t mean that. Any of it. I’m a liar, just like you said.Someone do something! Help me!” she’s hysterical.

“It shattered,” Hale’s voice cracks with disbelief. “Go get another one, Zedd! In the kitchen!”

“They’re missing,” Zedd’s tortured voice whimpers. “Bart took the last orange top.”

“Orange?!” Elle shrieks, her voice lifting with an edge of hope, then she’s gone in a whip of red, her heels clacking down the hall.

Fuck…all gone? This is it…but how can I leave my baby, again?

She’s back after a slow blink, and there’s more fighting: Hale restraining Alistair, Stassi sitting on Delphine, Zedd ignoring his father’s betrayed gaze as Dove slides across the glossy tile toward me on her knees.

“I thought all I wanted was you,” I whisper.

“Shh, don’t talk,” Stassi’s cracked voice says near my ear as Zedd rips off my sleeve just in case.

“He’s losing his bowels!” someone shouts, but they’re not talking about me. Not yet.

“I had you again,” I go on as Elle’s clumsy fingers fiddle with the new vial she’s still unsure if she’ll have to use. “In my bed beside me. But you weren’t really there because you hadn’t truly forgiven me. Now that you have, I finally have it… I feel it, Elle.”

“Feel what?” It’s more of a cry than a question. Hot tears fall onto my cheeks, and I wish I could catch them with my tongue. Hadn’t I told her I’d drink them all?

My tongue’s so heavy, but I have to say this.Hehas to hear it. Dove has to hear it.

“Peace,” I say. The peace I’ve been trying to find for two years. “It’s right there,” I twitch my index finger to the ceiling. “And it’s so bright.”

Elle

I never should have uttered those words, ‘I forgive you.’

He heard them, then he opened the gates wide and crossed. Or he tried to.

And I tried everything in my power to retie our souls. The Naloxone shot I stabbed through his shoulder saved his life, but what if…

I can’t stop the intrusive thoughts that are carving through my brain like glass scraping against bone. My eyes, nose, and throat burn themselves raw all over again, and the thick residue of the hospital’s antibacterial solutions in the air only exacerbates it. The most fucked up part? I wish I had a sprinkling of the heroin Gant overdosed on so I could enter a different dimension. One where our soul ties haven’t tried to unravel themselves at my selfish instruction.

‘Your life. Get on your fucking deathbed, and maybe the cost will be paid.’

‘Done.’

He said he knew Bart. He said to let him handle it. I hadn’t trusted that he could, just like I hadn’t trusted his promise.‘I will never leave you. I promise.’

He’d meant his words, with all his heart and soul, but I hadn’t meant mine.

I am a filthy liar, just like he always swore I was. I’m desperate to tell him how right he is, but I can’t. Not until he’s awake.

I watch his pale, peaceful face pressed against the pillows, with doll Elle tucked at his side since I couldn’t climb into the bed with him with the nurses still around. But I immediately divert my eyes because his tranquil slumber resembles the sleep that almost stole him from me.

My bloodshot eyes scan the monitors surrounding him. Despite hearing the steady beeps, I watch the moving lines, the flashing lights, the little numbers that I don’t know what the fuck they mean. I just know they should be there.

Ragged breathing to my left draws me to the only other sign of life in the room. Hale.

He’s staring despondently at Gant. In his lap, the blue light from his phone casts him in haunting shadows. From the speaker, a woman talks in rushed, hushed Romani, but Hale isn’t listening as his mother, Rosella, explains his adoption. His adoption I’d been forced to tell him about an hour ago.

His mother should’ve been the one to do it.

Or Silas, his father, who’s two doors down tucked into a hospital bed, too.

Or his half-brother Gant.

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