Page 61 of Still Yours

They were face down on the floor, crying in agony as Bino and Burner stood over them with guns to their heads. Even though Burner had taken care of his dirty work, he wasn’t satisfied. So months later, he was out hunting.

He had been depressed and questioning God about why he dealt the cards he gave him. Lunden betrayed him by befriending Diego behind his back for years. That pain hit worse than the agony he felt from his gunshot wounds every day.

He saved face for the people around him, especially his kids and fiancée, but deep down he was hurt and bitter, and it was sending him on late-night revenge runs. Every evil thought he had since he was fifteen had resurfaced, and he was executing them.

Burner handed Dexz the gun he was holding because he knew his boy wanted to do the honors. The girls were whimpering and praying, but God wasn’t on their side at the moment. Even after they viciously broke into Diego’s family home and told the girls the deal, they didn’t understand why they had to die for their father’s mistakes. He let off a shot in each of the girls' heads, feeling no mercy.

Dexz woke up in a cold sweat at four in the morning when the gunshots in his nightmares woke him up. He had a pounding headache, and the pain he felt in his body was enough to make a grown man cry. Nothing seemed to work for his pain anymore, and it was breaking him mentally. Everything that happened in his sleep was real and had gone down the night before.

Pretti was on vacation in Fiji with Storm and the kids, after having their daughter, Beauti. She was on her feet a week after having her, and now she was taking their children to see the world. Dexz couldn’t fly due to his condition and his parole, so he was drowning in misery and pain meds alone. He promised her he would relax for the whole two weeks she was gone, but all he’d gotten into was trouble.

Dexz staggered out of bed in the dark, and it was pouring rain outside. He could hear the thunder, and lightning was flashing through the curtains. He went inside the bathroom and stood in front of the sink, glaring at his reflection in the mirror. At twenty-three, he could barely recognize himself. In his eyes, he looked forty-five, and his body felt like he was seventy.

The doctors told him he would get better, but he felt like he was only getting worse. Pretti had been begging to cut his hair but was never in the mood. He started massaging his temples because his head was still pounding.

He picked up one of the six pill bottles with his pain medicine and quickly popped the top. He took four Percocet, two Xanax, and two Ativan, washed it down with tap water, and prayed that it worked. He knew that he was taking way too many pills, but he was becoming desperate. It was his second week overdoing it.

“Ahh!” he felt an intense pain in his back. Nerve pain was the worst of his agony.

He stared at himself, going through the pain until it subsided, but a wave of unease washed over him, a familiar sense of foreboding tightening in his chest. He blinked, and his reflection momentarily distorted before snapping back into focus. The room seemed to waver around him as if reality itself were playing a trick on his senses.

“Beauti,” he mumbled, hearing his daughter’s first cries in his head like he was next to Pretti when she delivered her.

He wondered why he didn’t feel a connection to his kids. He looked at them like they were everything, but felt nothing. Yes, he loved them, but he was afraid to be around them. He didn’t want to hurt them like his family did him, so his thoughts caused him to back away most days.

Déjà vu engulfed him, a sensation he couldn’t shake off. Flashbacks of Lunden’s head being severed and the number of killings he had committed in the last seventy-two hours flooded his brain like he was living the moments again. Good and devious thoughts mixed, making him tense.

He felt trapped within the confines of his own mind. Memories collided and overlapped, blurring the lines of past and present, reality and future. Dexz's heart raced, a cold sweat forming on his left brow. He could hear the faint sound of his own breathing, ragged and uneven.

Panic surged through his veins as an invincible force seemed to grip his brain, twisting it in a painful vice. He clung to the sink, gripping it tight with all his might. His vision was swimming as he teetered on the precipice of something beyond his control. Dexz collapsed to the floor, and everything after that was a blur…

$$$$$

“Beauti is going to be so fussy wearing this dress at the wedding. My poor little baby,” Pretti showed Storm a gorgeous puffy white dress that she generated through artificial intelligence for the designer she hired for all her wedding garments because everything was going to be custom. They were sitting at the resort’s outdoor restaurant, having lunch and enjoying the view of the ocean like they had been doing since they had gotten there.

“My little crybaby niece. She is going to look so adorable.” Storm beamed as she looked at Pretti’s phone screen.

“Chile, and Ethan hates suits. I did a test run when I took him to church, and he was taking off the bowtie and shoes.”

“They’ll be fine like they are now. The beach atmosphere seems to keep them calm.” Stormed looked at her friend’s children, dressed in designer beach attire. They were sleeping peacefully in their comfy double stroller. She loved the way Pretti dressed her kids and made sure they were comfortable.

Every time she looked at them, she got baby fever. She and Burner had gotten close, but his baby mama situation scared her, even though she knew Kimi well. Burner had invited her into his bedroom with Kimi after he told her he was into poly relationships, and she accepted. She enjoyed her time with them, but she wasn’t sure if that was what she wanted. Kimi only had three of Burner’s kids. She was sexy and cool, but she had to do a lot of thinking.

“Excuse me, but I have a phone call for Ms. Phoenix. The caller said that it is urgent,” one of the resort staff workers walked up and said, grabbing the girl’s attention.

“Urgent? Who is it?”

“The caller said they are your fiancé’s nurse.”

“Oh my God, okay. Storm, stay here with the kids. I will be right back.”

“Of course, and I hope everything is okay.” Stormed gazed at her friend with concern.

Thankful she had given Dexz and his nurses the resort number, she rushed to the phone with the worker because her phone service was trash.

On the phone, she was frightened by what the nurse was telling her.

“I found Dexten seizing on the bathroom floor when I came in about thirty minutes ago. He had three of them before the ambulance came, and I don’t know how long he had been in the bathroom suffering. I’m trailing behind the ambulance now, but the EMT’s won’t tell me a thing.” Nurse Niki informed her, sounding shaky.