Page 91 of Heartless Heathens
“No Romina, I don’t like you.” I spoke my truth too dryly.
“Oh.” She looked down, her confidence dissolving and her embarrassment evident.
She looked unsure of herself, but she didn’t dare make eye contact again. She picked up the scraps of her clothing before she darted out of my room, practically naked.
I was glad she left.
The puppy dog eyes didn’t work on me, but had she stayed another moment I would have been forced to tell her that I didn’t like her, because like was an emotion for children on the playground.
I liked a good cup of coffee. I liked dark and stormy nights. I liked watching Frodo get stabbed by the Nazgûl Lord with the Morgul-knife on Weathertop. Fuck, I even liked it when she called me sir, even if it was to antagonize me.
But this girl?
That couldn’t be reduced to such a fickle fucking word.
I was addicted to her. Mesmerized. I was dead fucking obsessed and I knew I was undeniably fucked when it came to her.
But I wasn’t brave enough to let her know that.
Because I wasn’t strong enough to keep her once this all blew up.
And it would blow up. It was just a matter of time.
Fallingintoarhythmwith the men who had broken into my life felt a lot easier than any previous moment that had once been ruled by Father Frollo. Felix was a dream my heart conjured up long ago when I’d been in search of a knight, it was hard to believe he was real, that something so good could last.
Corvin was the easiest to talk to. He was always eager to discover what kind of thoughts were in my head and he shared equal parts of himself without holding back. He was determined to make me strong, so that no one else could break me again.
Sonny was…
Sonny was all four horsemen sent to bring me to submission in their hellish crusade. Except I found I was rather fond of being on my knees and it wasn’t for reverence. But Sonny was filled with complexities I didn’t understand, and I discovered that the wall he’d built up was one I couldn’t break through on my own.
It had been a little over a month since they’d found me and we’d gone on living this way, without any of us really questioning what it meant. An impending sense of doom was constantly crushing my heart flat. I thought Frollo would come in here and tear it all down. I was paralyzed by the thought of him taking me away from them. I was starting to believe my fears were the reason the dreams were happening nearly every night now. The drowning, the snake, the crucifix. But I couldn’t make sense of it all.
With the Escuras, I learned where the root of contempt came from. Felix told me their history with the church and how Corvin’s condition began soon after Frollo murdered their mother. At first I didn’t believe them, that the man who’d raised me and kept me alive all these years could do something so horrendous.
But as time passed and weeks of sharing our lives together went by, I’d come to find that maybe they weren’t the monsters Frollo had painted them to be. That maybe I’d been the fool all along.
A science experiment.
A toy for his amusement.
Whatever his reasons for keeping me all this time, there was nothing genuine or decent in his motives. That much I knew. But it gnawed something terrible inside of me not understanding why I’d lived the way I’d lived for so long.
I almost always slept in Felix’s bed. All three had agreed together, without me, that Corvin couldn’t be trusted to not hurt me. It was rare any time we spent together went unchaperoned, whether it was with one of the boys or Reesa hanging around.
Sonny called me to him nearly every night until he’d finished reading me the Hobbit. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had finished it myself close to two weeks prior on my own. Like an addict, I went back to him regardless of how much it hurt. Maybe it was because he looked like he was in just as much pain and somehow that comforted me. Maybe it was because I’d foundThe Lord of The Ringseven more interesting than the first book.
Corvin had told me to make Sonny wantit, whateveritwas. I had a feeling I was doing the exact opposite. Slowly locking myself down inside with the same feelings of shame and inadequacy the archbishop had so kindly bestowed upon me. All because I was fixated on a sentence Reesa had once planted into my head. Every night, when we finished, I promptly left the room and he didn’t argue, didn’t bother using whatever magic he could to force me back to him.
He always let me go.
And it hurt sharply because I just wanted so badly for him to ask me to stay. Nothing compared to sleeping in the safety of his arms, but he’d decided I wasn’t worthy of it any longer. He wouldn’t ask me to stay, or maybe he couldn’t.
Maybe those weren’t words Sonny Santorini was capable of unleashing into the world. I’d learned enough around these men the last few weeks, enough to know that magic existed everywhere and that words were spells. Once casted out of our mouth they could conjure all sorts of hell or blessings into the world.
As for the universe?
There was no karma.
