AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I wish I didn’t sleep so heavily. I wish I knew he was visiting me.”
“Every night, Cat. The obsession has never gone away.”
“I don’t see him as a monster. Is that crazy?”
“No,” Jolie smiled. “Hell did truly terrible things to me, but I don’t see him as a monster, either. Exceptions are made by circumstances.”
Those exceptions she spoke of made Woodrow shudder.
“We haven’t even spoken about us, and I have so many questions. But I don’t feel like it’s impossible to forgive him.”
“It’s not.” Jolie’s hand brushed my knee. “Remi isn’t bad. He’s done bad things in the past, under the influence of drugs and alcohol, but that doesn’t define him as a person.”
“And even if it did, he’s not the person he once was, Cat,” Ollie had a lot to add. “He was an asshole who did shitty things to you, and he has told me all of them.”
“Remi hurt me.”
"I know.”
“He raped me. He drugged me. He let me get sold. He kept it all a secret.” The words hurt.
“I know.”
“But I know the drugs altered his perception of right and wrong back then. They changed him so much that the night he raped me, I didn’t even feel like I knew him. I remember being so scared.”
Everyone looked away from me.
“He was so manic. Talking to trees like they could answer him.”
“It was likely a bad trip.” Dec shared my thoughts. “He had a few of those here early on. “I remember he had an argument with a lamp that got so bad, you had to take it from the room and put it in the trash. Do you remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.” Ollie swallowed. “It wasn’t nice to be around him back then. You know, Cat, when he first brought you here and told me who you were. I begged him to send you to Beyond Heaven. I thought the reunion would be catastrophic for you both. I went as far as calling him toxic and even risked my relationship with him, and that wasn’t something that came naturally to us. Remi didn’t like me at the start, which was understandable. He tolerated Dec because Dec’s just one of those people, isn’t he? Like part of the furniture.”
“Yeah, but not that lamp.” Dec laughed, always eager to lift a depressive mood.
“True. And he was strangely fascinated when he met Woodrow. There was an instant bond, with the desire to protect him or rile him if Hell was around. It was different with me. He didn’t trust me. He didn’t like that I’d drag him into The Clinic and force him to do a job he didn’t want, but I did it to stop Alerion from killing him. I fought daily with Remi to stop him from putting shit in his system that was threatening to do the same thing. He didn’t like that, either. He didn’t like that I had rules for him to follow, and I was hard on him, threatening him with rehabs if he even looked out of line because I had no idea how to care for an addict.”
Ollie looked away from me, both his brothers meeting his stare, remembering the struggles. “He was depressed, and I was the cause, but here, at home, he found friendships in the boys, and they lifted his moods. It took him a while before he saw that what they had with him, they had with me, and eventually, he started opening up a little, speaking to me without me forcing him to. It was mostly just pointless chit-chat for a long time, but it was something. It still took him until a relapse to tell me what he hated most about his life—human sales, being the Decoy, and then an inker. He told me he hated it so much because of you, a girl he’d led in and couldn’t forget. Alerion, our boss—”
I cringed, and Ollie saw it, his hand making its way into mine. He held tight.
“Alerion had let him live. Forced him into a new role to keep a life he struggled with.”
“He was hard on Remi,” Dec added. “He had it worse than anyone else. And Alerion was brutal to most people.”
“He was abusive to Remi.” I sealed my mouth, fearing I’d already said too much.
“He was, in multiple ways,” Ollie agreed. “Alerion had eyes for him, eyes that liked to see parts of him he shouldn’t. And too often, he would be able to, because—”
“Because Remi was always extremely high. Sometimes, he’d be out of it on the floor, unable to lift his head up, never mind fight back.” Dec shook his head.
“I couldn’t even stop it.” Ollie was truly devastated by his omission. “And fuck, I wanted to. But Alerion was above everything, making up the rules as he went, and I was a rookie with no standing power back then. My opinion meant shit.” Ollie rubbed his face, clearing the sweat building on his brow. “And then he gave Remi the tattooist role, not because he could draw, but because he knew it would hurt him, because he knew how deeply rooted into him you—a human sale—were. He could barely sit down when they first put him in that chair. I don’t know what the fuck had been done to him in the hours before. And I’d never ask. Especially now.”
“Remi can’t look to the past.” Little things he’d said to me proved that. “He struggles with it.”
“I don’t blame him. He did have a shitty fucking life. He’d have been content to overdose.”
“He tried.” Dec fidgeted with his cuticles, staying present through a flashback.
