“My mom didn’t come to me in that closet, and my father knew it was the one form of punishment that didn’t show any physical scars. He would tell me to sit with what I’d done wrong. And I’d scream and scream until I lost my voice, and then I’d cry for hours and hours. Until the tears were gone. It made me hate the silence. Hate being boxed in. Hate being in the dark and alone. I’m living in it now, Oracle, and I can’t take it.”
Oracle told me it would be over soon, and I agreed.
“It might be the best birthday ever if I go now … Happy birthday to me huh?” The world was getting fuzzier now. “Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to fucking me. Happy fucking birthday to me.”
I sang it over and over again into Oracle… until I fell asleep.
But Bane came to me in a dream.
He cursed me over and over, a look on his face I’d never seen before.
“Are you scared?” I smiled at him because he looked frightened of me… or for me.
“You’re not supposed to poison yourself, Pink. Only me, baby girl. Only me.” He held my face in his hands, and it almost looked like there were tears in his eyes.
It wasn’t possible.
Bane Black didn’t feel sadness. Didn’t feel anything for me at all.
And then he squeezed my cheeks so my mouth opened and stuck his fingers so far into my throat that I gagged.
Over and over he did it until I vomited.
God, he hated mess. I wonder what he would have said if it wasn’t a dream.
He was screaming at someone and then I was being lifted and staring down at the red all over the tile. It was smeared all around. On his clothes and my robe. “It’s a mess,” I told him. “I made a mess, but at least it’s a pretty one, right?”
“Fuck, baby girl. Your messes are always pretty.” He was walking next to me, his hand on my cheek, and I wondered how I was moving while lying down, but I was so tired that I closed my eyes even while he told me, “Stay with me, Pink. Don’t you dare fucking leave me. You understand? You never get to leave me. Not like this.”
I think I at least smiled at his statement. It was a lovely one. I didn’t want to leave him. Didn’t he get that? I wanted to stay with him forever and never be alone.
Alone was the worst place to be when you were trapped in loneliness already.
CHAPTER 17
BANE
I’d seenbodies bleed out before. Too many. Men who begged for their lives, enemies who spat in my face, traitors who took a bullet to the gut and made me watch them drown in their own blood. I’d seen it all before the age of eighteen even.
None of it ever touched me or affected me. I delivered kills like I’d deliver a report to my brother. Without blinking and without emotion.
But Bianca on that bathroom floor bleeding out?
That fucking destroyed me.
Now I sat outside her room at the facility, elbows on my knees, hands laced together so tightly my knuckles burned. I tapped my fingers three times onto my hand, trying anything to calm myself.
Three times didn’t work.
Three breaths didn’t work.
And three days of going in her room and asking how she was, what happened, did she want to talk, and the same questions over and over.
She never answered me. Just waved me away.
“I will if you answer me, Pink.”
Her gaze was full of hate as she glared at me, and then she’d look at her wrists and the soft gown she was in and then close her eyes like she didn’t want to talk.
