Page 49 of Ruin

Feelings and emotions and rights and wrongs. All of it blurs and morphs and twists into something I can’t understand. So I shut it all out.

Stay quiet, stay hidden, try to pretend I don’t have any of those things. The invisible things can break a person more than me and my weaponry ever could.

I drop my cheek to the top of Ava’s head, her breath catching in her throat, she holds it in her lungs, the sharp inhale, and I silently count to five before she exhales again, her fingertips flexing against my chest.

“Do you like sweets, Ava?” I whisper, little fluffy hairs on the top of her head blowing with my expelled breath. “Hm?” I hum, “you like desserts?” I don’t shift away from where I rest atop her head, and eventually she nods, just one tiny incline of her head, but it makes me smile all the same. “What kinda thing you like?” I whisper again, keeping us locked in this small, protective bubble of vulnerability. “Chocolate?” no response. “Cake?” again, nothing. “Ice cream?” a small nod, and my lips pull up into a smile. “Vanilla?” … “Strawberry?” another nod.

I hum again, and I can’t get rid of the curl of my lips.

“My little Ava is such a good girl,” I rasp a little louder, my hand still massaging her calves, and her head moves beneath my cheek.

Another nod.

I huff a small laugh, “Shall I find us some, Baby Bird?” her fingers twitch against my chest, nails sharp, and I frown.

The tightness in my features easing almost instantly as I think I realise why.

“Are you worried about me leaving you for too long, little Ava?” And the nod comes instantly, harder than all the rest. “Don’t you remember what I said?” I’m still whispering so there’s less strain on my larynx, but the longer she holds her answer, the more I feel my grip on her readying to tighten.

I replay my own words over and over in my head, hoping there’s some way she’ll hear them, even though I don’t say them out loud.

‘You’re mine, Baby Bird.’

‘I’m going to keep you forever.’

‘I’m never letting you go.’

“Ava?” I blow out a breath of frustration. “Do you remember what I told you?” desperation bleeds out in my cracked words, because I want her to.

I need to know she listens to every word I tell her and believes it. I mean nothing to the world, but to her, I am the world. The only thing in it. Only words, only food, only light, only dark.

It’s all me.

But if I still mean nothing, even here, where I am the only thing that exists. I don’t understand the point of anything at all.

But then she nods, kickstarting my heart and keeping me just a little further back from the edge.

Chapter23

Charlie

One arm beneath her legs, the other threading up the length of her spine, fingers gripping her nape, I cradle Ava to my chest. Her face in the hollow of my throat, little warm puffs of breath against my neck. Her arms caught between us, hands curled over my shoulders, she clings onto me, and I can hardly bear to let her go again.

But I do, as I promise, “I’m coming right back.”

I place her back down in her cage, the chain attached to her throat clanking and making my ears ring. I peer at the long length of it, cocking my head, but just as I’m looking at it, it’s being gathered up, slithering like a metal serpent inside the cage. I glance up, hands clasped together, elbows on my knees where I crouch low. Ava stares at me, her fingers closed tightly around the severed end of the chain like it’s her lifeline.

Curious.

I think about it, her reaction, all the way up to the kitchens.

I pull open the freezer door, scanning over the contents. I’m not really one for sweet things, so I’m not sure why it even entered my head, but I wanted to talk to her. And I don’t really know how to make small talk. It just felt…right,to ask her about something that she could answer without words.

Something else I don’t know how to make better.

Her voice.

I like the quiet, but I can’t get the memory of her broken voice, when she struggled to give me her name, out of my head. Or those breathy moans, the cracked, hoarse groans that bubbled up from her throat when I had my tongue buried inside her cunt.

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