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She thinks her life is over.
I thought about it.
About us.
And I ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Enemies don’t jump out from behind the darkness, they often boldly walk at you in the light. —King Campisi
Bella
I fell for it.
Like an idiot, I fell for it.
I went on a very pissed off walk, off property, yelling at security that if they followed me, I’d slit their throats and did the stupid human thing. I left my purse, I left my phone, I left my security, and I left every shred of pride I had and went to the cliff, the one that Ivan used to run to whenever we had family dinners, and he got upset.
“It would be so fucking easy.” Ivan stared down the ravine. “How high do you think it is?”
It scared me when he talked like that; I mean, I hated him, and I threatened him, but I didn’t want to truly end him. “I don’t know, maybe a hundred feet until you fall into the tiny stream and hit rock.”
He snorted. “Yeah, that’s only a few feet of water, splat you would go, but you’d feel like, flying, for a minute you know? You’d feel free.”
“Are you in prison?” I joked. “I mean, you realize you just walked away from a bougie brunch where they serve alcohol to minors and give you gold plates because they’re pretty and blood can’t stain them.”
He barked out a laugh. “Never thought I’d look at gold and be like, oh cool, way easier to clean.”
“It really is.”
“Real gold doesn’t tarnish.”
“Kind of ironic, the bloodstains won’t stay, but every time I look at those plates, I wonder how much people will remember of me when I’m gone, you know? Will I be just like that blood on the gold plate that gets wiped clean, or will I last, will I be the one drop that stays?”
I sat down next to him. “Do you want to tarnish then?”
“I wouldn’t call it tarnishing. I would call it being remembered. Existing.”
I sighed, tempted to lay my head on his shoulder. “I can’t decide if that’s tragic or foolish.”
“Both.” He jumped to his feet and looked down. “If I’m ever missing, just look in the ravine.”
I scrambled to my feet and nearly fell back onto the dusty rocks. “Don’t joke like that.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it’s better to own your own destiny than turn around just in time for the knife to get shoved into your back, ever thought of it that way?”
I smacked him on the arm, then pinched it for good measure, he could be such an asshole! “No, and you shouldn’t either.”
Why was I so angry at him for talking like this? I shouldn’t care, but his truth scared me more than the reality of what we were living in.
He leveled me with an intense stare that I couldn’t pull away from. “You’ve really never thought how much easier it would be to fly?”
I didn’t admit it to him. How suffocating it could be, how suffocating it was, and how every day I just wanted to be free for one second, feel the wind against my face, control the end, not just pretend everything was okay when I knew it could literally change at any second.
“Promise me if you ever get to that point, you’ll wait for me here first,” I said instead of answering.
“Same.” He held out his hand; it was beautiful in the morning light. “Promise me if it ever hurts too much and all you want to do is fly—you wait for me too, all right?”
