Page 4 of Ruin

Arms folded across my chest, I wait for Kyla-Rose to return with the tarpaulin. Something I don’t think we’ll need…immediately.

I grip my throat, feel the criss-cross of scars, crawl my fingers up the side of my neck, thumb the top of my right ear beneath my razor-cut hair. Feel the tiny divot in the cartilage, a missing piece Kyla-Rose tore out with her teeth because I locked her in a cage. She thought it could help me. With my trauma. It didn’t. I couldn’t wait to let her out.

“Charl?” her voice is like silk husk, rougher and deeper than most women’s, but it’s still always soft for me.

I look up, finding her a few feet away. Laced boots, skinny jeans, t-shirt tucked in, leather jacket, all of it black. A piece of her white hair drifts across her face, catching in her thick lashes, she blinks it free, those wide grey orbs locked on mine. It feels like we stick. In moments like these. Our lives so vastly different from what they were before. Well, hers. Mine is the same. Apart from being a little lonelier now. Without her. I am still the same.

She is different. A mum now, a wife to three men, a feared leader of The Firm. All things we would never be together. Apart from the last one, we still technically rule together. I’m just not interested in doing it anymore. I don’t think I ever really was. I only did it because it’s what she wanted. But she doesn’t need me anymore. Not really. My chest feels like it deflates, rib bones buckling, turning in towards my heart like gripping talons.

“There’s no body,” I rasp, the strain pulling the tendons in my neck taut.

“What?” she asks quietly, feet still planted, I want to grab her by the hair, pull her in closer, bite the tip of her pretty fucking nose off.

But I don’t.

Watching her as she pulls her brows together, her face half in shadow. She cocks her head, lips curling in between her teeth. And then they pop free, eyebrows lifting on her forehead.

“Oh,” realisation dawns. “They’re still alive?”

I nod silently, turning to glance back over my shoulder, peering into the darkness as though I might be able to see the cage from where I stand.

“We’ll need something to cut the bars.”

Her brows pinch again, she glides a step closer, I think of the blade pressing into the small of my back, can hear the snick of it as I imagine slashing it against her skin.

“There’s no door?”

She’s in front of me now. I start to count down from ten. The way she gazes up at me twists my fucking guts and I see white spots spark across my vision. Her scent. Coconut, limes. It is a poison. Infecting my lungs.

“No.”

She looks past me, too close, like she can see, the same way I stared into the pitch container. Seeing nothing. Then she blinks, heavily, gaze refocusing on me and I take a step back, making her frown.

It’s for your safety, Lala.

The space.

Our separation.

She wouldn’t understand.

The way I feel now.

About the world.

Since I killed my brother.

For her.

“Get Eli,” I tell her, looking over the top of her head, a strange pull in my chest forcing me to stay sentry at the open doors of the container.

She stares at me for a moment, blinks, dipping her chin, and then she drops the bundled tarp at my feet, turns her back to me and heads back towards the others.

Chapter3

Charlie

Red bulbs glow bright in the high ceiling of my cavernous basement. The walls a black painted concrete, the floor sloped towards the centre for drainage. There are tunnels. Ones I can use to slip in and out of the house unnoticed. It is easier. Now that she is not here. Kyla-Rose. Her voice infecting my brain, her scent steadily dripping like a drug to an addict into my bloodstream.

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