Page 51 of Fear the Reapers
I let out a deep breath and let my mind flow, searching for one of the many fairy tales I memorized as a child. The tale of Beauty and the Beast was the only story my mind could come up with, and I cursed at the irony.
Out of all the fairy tales, Beauty and the Beast was my least favorite as a child. I never understood what possessed Belle to love someone who was so undeniably awful to her.
She was beautiful and kind, and The Beast was bitter and cold. Her father being there was a complete misunderstanding, but the asshole of a beast didn’t care. He used her father’s mistake to his advantage, and he stole a girl he had no business taking.
After some time together, Belle began sympathizing with The Beast and before she knew it, he became the center of her universe. Someone she couldn’t fathom living without. She fell in love with a monster.
The similarities to my situation weren’t lost on me. Here I was obsessing over my own monsters. Falling so easily into my own distorted fantasy that I blatantly ignored the cold, hard facts.
The Reapers were bad people. Deranged killers who accepted a girl as payment for a fucking debt. Lying, cheating, and stealing were regular business practices for them. They didn’t understand the concept of boundaries and they saw me as nothing more than an object, something to play with whenever and wherever they wanted.
Yet for all their faults, deep down, I knew I was just as bad as they were. I didn’t care about the blood on their hands. I had no qualms about the punishments they dealt, and if I’d done my fair share of lying, cheating, and stealing in my own life to survive and in the grand scheme of things, that was what they were doing too. A sick part of me even enjoyed being owned by them, they felt like the family I never got to have.
But this wasn’t a fairy tale. The Reapers weren’t my knights in shining armor who were going to magically turn into princes if I just loved them enough. They were unapologetically themselves, and nothing I did was going to change that. The question was, was I willing to accept them for all that they were?
The question lingered in my mind even after the darkness started to cloud my vision. It didn’t feel like I was being pulled into a normal slumber, but I was tired of the pain and I knew if I gave in, the familiar nothingness that had always made me feel invincible would welcome me with open arms. So I went willingly and avoided answering the question I already knew the answer to.
Chapter 30
Tristan
I shouldn’t have been watching, but I just couldn’t help myself. She needed to be punished. Needed to know there were consequences for her actions, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t check in on her.
When we bought the house, we outfitted every room with hidden security cameras. I monitored the cameras in both our businesses and our home, but I made it a point to never check the footage in our house unless it was absolutely necessary. Monitoring Stevie was like a necessity.
As I sat at my desk and turned on the live feed to her room, she was nowhere in sight. I switched screens to the hallway camera and found her guard, Tony, posted in his usual spot. It was just after 8pm and her dinner still sat untouched outside of her bedroom door. I had to give it to her. The girl was as stubborn as she was beautiful.
After watching her for the last couple of weeks, I knew her daily patterns like the back of my hand. She wasn’t in bed, not sitting in front of the fireplace, nor staring out of her window. The only other place left was her closet. It was the one space in her room the cameras couldn’t pick up on. I scrolled through my phone and tried not to stare at the empty screen. She’d show up, eventually. It wasn’t like she could go anywhere else.
Ten minutes had gone by and I glanced at the monitor again. It wasn’t like her to be out of view for that long. I searched the screen, trying to pick up on any clue that something was wrong, but nothing seemed amiss. She just vanished.
Barrelling out of my room, I threw my door open and barked at Tony for the key to her door. Tony fumbled, caught off by my sudden appearance and the fact that I spoke to him. He was taking too long to find the fucking key on his key ring and I was growing impatient. Stevie would’ve heard the commotion and come to the door by now. Something wasn’t right.
Jamming my shoulder into the door with full force a few times, I ripped the door off of its hinges. As soon as I entered the room and spotted Stevie, my heart seized. Her frail body looked so tiny in the white nightgown she wore. Her skin was paler than before and gone was the rosy flush of her lips and cheeks that brought her expressive face to life.
Fuck.
I pulled her into my arms as Tony’s dumbass stumbled in after me.
“Call a fucking ambulance and tell my brothers to get their asses in here, now!”
Tony frantically nodded his head and raced for the door as I checked her vitals. Her breathing was shallow, and she felt cool to the touch, but she had a steady pulse. She was going to be okay. She had to be okay.
“Fuck.” I cursed, pressing my lips to her cold forehead. “Hold on, baby. Help is coming.”
???
“What did Dr. Roswell s... say?” I asked, eyeing Atlas as he reentered the room.
After getting her stabilized, the doctor pulled Atlas aside to discuss Stevie’s condition in private. He was probably trying to pinpoint how her health had deteriorated so much under our care.
“She’s stable.” Atlas grunted, looking out her window at the dark sky. “She needs to rest.”
Ezra gave Atlas a somber look as he brushed Stevie’s hair out of her face. As soon as the medics laid her on her bed, Ezra curled up next to her and refused to leave.
“She needs to fucking eat.” Cyrus retorted, pacing at the foot of her bed. “This shit,” he said, gesturing to Stevie’s sullen body, “has gone on long enough.”
He was right. We set out to teach her a lesson, but we were going about it all wrong. She ran because she didn’t trust us, but keeping her locked up would only strengthen that distrust. Besides, she wasn’t the only one that created this mess.
