“I need to assess you,” I sign, grateful I know how.
My voice would expose too much muckiness a medical professional shouldn’t have if I were to speak, and the sentiment highlighting it doubles when JR grunts out a disapproving reply.
He’s been mistreated and misunderstood, but since the very thing he was taken down trying to protect is in front of him, uninjured and safe, he acts as if he has the world at his feet.
And no matter the cost, I’m going to ensure he does.
ChapterTwenty-Four
JR
Twenty Years Old
My frustration skyrockets when the vine I’m using as a noose snaps under my weight for the third time in the past hour. It’s strangling the life out of the trees surrounding me, but no matter how many times I endeavor for it to snap my neck before crushing my windpipe, it doesn’t happen.
Suicide should never be an option, but what other choice do I have? My baby sister and the woman who endeavored to save us are dead, my father wants me to take the downfall for their murders, and I’m broke.
The documents he paraded in front of me in my hospital room looked real because they were. Every single dollar in my trust fund is gone. I don’t have a penny to my name, and despite me answering my father’s every whim yesterday, Old Man Stephens doesn’t either.
My father didn’t even wait an hour after the fight to order the torching of Old Man Stephens’ workshop. He burned it to the ground before setting alight his attached cabin.
That’s how I ended up here, hours from my hometown, at the base of a mountain skiers occupy for hours on end during the winter months. I rode here on the tray of a truck of a man who should hate me, confident anywhere he’d take me would be better than where I’ll end up when I finally succeed at taking my life.
I don’t necessarily want to die, but even hell would have to be better than asking my father for help. I’d rather not exist at all than become his puppet like Roberto and Dimitri.
After breathing out the heaviness most likely weighing down the noose, I stand to my feet, dust off my backside, then reclimb the tree that looks like it’s been here for centuries.
Chunks of bark flick up into my face when I scoot across a branch double the width of my thighs to reach the snapped vine dangling off it. With my mind blank of a single thought, I remove the busted length of liana before twisting two recently cut pieces together, hopeful plaiting it like I imagine Jae would have done with her dead-straight hair will make it more durable.
While knotting the ends together, a shimmer in the far corner of the tree-dotted landscape captures my attention. It isn’t a light, more the sun that’s slowly rising on the horizon bouncing off a reflective material.
“What is that?” I mumble to myself since there isn’t a single person within a fifty-mile radius of me. An abounded piece of metal shouldn’t move the way it is. It follows the sways of my head, blinding me more than once when I secure the plaited liana around the tree’s branch.
Regretfully, I’m not a curious man, so instead of investigating the ray distracting me from the ultimate endgame, I drag the reinforced noose over my head, tighten the knot I’m praying will hold for the required time to knock me out, count to three, then leap off the branch like I’m bungee jumping off the Auckland Bridge.
The vine holds out longer this time around. It brings me so close to asphyxiation, white spots dance in front of my eyes, but a mere second before the blackness can fully take hold, the liana holding me several feet from the ground once again snaps, sending me crashing back to earth with an almighty bang.
“Fuck!”
The echo of my fist crashing in the snow slash ground exposes how alone I am. It’s me versus the world…and perhaps the reflective light that won’t fucking quit even when it wins.
Its blinding rays snap my last nerve so perversely, before I know what I plan to do when I reach it, I sprint through the dense woodlands separating us like my feet aren’t cut up and bleeding from the mad dash I did to escape the officers chasing me when I leaped out the window of Jae’s hospital room and ran like my feet weren’t taking me straight back to the bane of my existence.
Hopeton is my hometown, but it is far from home to me. It is where my mother was killed, my father rules, and where I learned more than my sister had gained her angel wings.
By the time I reached Hopeton, Jae’s death was circulated on every news channel in the country. The journalists stated the talented up-and-coming doctor died a hero, but that she didn’t make it out of the marshland breathing. They completely overlooked the fact that I tried to save her after she had done the same for me.
My brutal speed through the dense tree-studded landscape slows when I reach an opening in the forest-like setting. A log cabin sits in the far-right corner of the cleared land. It appears abandoned, but I still stammer out a greeting while hesitantly pacing toward it. “H-Hello? Is a-anyone here?”
The eerie creak of the front door peeling open doesn’t register with my damaged ears, but the girlie squeal that rips from my throat when I walk through a spider web years in the making is so loud, they register it twice.
Spiders give me the fucking creeps, and I’m man enough to admit that.
My curiosity piques when I spot a large bundle of rope in a room I assume will become a bathroom since it’s half plumbed.
Perhaps that’s why this cabin beckoned me?
Rope would have to be far more durable than a length of vine.
