Page 66 of Why Broken Wings Fray

Blood.

I killed someone.

Blood.

I killed someone.

Blood.

I killed someone.

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All that I knew was that Raegan was alive.

Killian was alive.

Urram was alive – albeit, pissed.

Shea and Aisling, Ciara and Liam, were all alive.

The fairies – not so much. Only one survived. Taran, who fled on a pinch of dust at his feet.

I couldn’t tell you how the fight ended, other than that. I couldn’t tell you how many of Raegan’s ceadan died, or how bloody the room became. I couldn’t tell you how long it took to end. I couldn’t tell you how I left the room. I couldn’t tell you how I ended up back in the room that I was inclined to call mine.

All I could tell you was this: I was back in my room, my hands soaked in blood that had turned sticky, and everything around me was blurry. There were no tears in my eyes, only a heavy pounding in my head that beat at my eardrums and threatened to deafen me completely. But I could not look away from my hands.

My hands.

Blood.

So much blood.

I had seen blood. I knew blood. I operated day-in, day-out. I sliced into flesh at every hour of the day and I packed wounds every spare second. So I was no stranger to the red liquid, nor the way it changed from runny to sticky to flaky. I knew how it smelled, what temperatures it could take to, how it interacted with other substances and materials.

But I did not know blood like the blood on my hands now. I did not know the blood of a stranger, of another being that had the ability to speak to me, to look at me, to know me. I did not know blood as it poured over my skin, I did not know blood that came from an act of violence and not an act of healing.

A little part of me unravelled at this moment. It was only a tiny fray, a tiny thread that dared to separate from the rest, but I felt it. I knew that all one would need to do was grab it and pull, and all that I was, all that Olivia was, would disappear.

I remained frozen, still, completely unmoving, for two hours. I knew it was two hours because the sun outside of my window was starting to come up, meaning that at some point between Raegan and I standing on the balcony, until now, an entire night had passed.

The first ray of the sun shone through the room and penetrated my skin, setting a rusty colour across the blood that forced me to blink. Ray by ray, inch by inch of the lifting sun, I woke out of my state of petrified stillness.

But I was in no way okay. I moved from the bedroom to the attached ensuite, closed the door, and set myself over the tub. It had been a while since I had to try and use their strange method of bathing, but I was running solely on muscle memory as I cranked at the indoor well. It creaked, the noise just as agonized as my skeleton was starting to feel, until it was spitting water into the tub.

The few baths I had in Saoghal required two pinches of powder that was forever accessible at the side of the tub. Two would bring it up to temperature, a soothing warmth that would be capable of settling most.

I dropped two pinches in. Then two more. Steam started to lift from the bubbles that formed, the sensation hot and scalding. I dropped two more pinches in, hardly feeling as it burned at my face. All I knew was that the heat was growing and growing, becoming more and more promising with every pinch I put in.

I lost count of how many pinches fell in, before I dropped the bag to the side and instead waited and waited for the tub to fill.

I didn’t remember shedding my clothes, only that I had, and I stepped into the tub. The temperature was far hotter than I had ever dared to take to, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. Only the hottest of waters would wash away the stains.

I finally switched the water off when there was enough to cover most of my body, leaving my curled-over shoulders and head out of it. It was truly hot, hot enough that my skin immediately turned red and I groaned every time I made the smallest movement, but that was good. It was burning layers off and that was good. A few more layers and it just might get rid of the blood–

On the edge of the bath, a little scrub-brush caught my attention. I ripped a somewhat bloody hand from the water and snatched the brush, using the other to assess the rigidness and stiffness of the bristles. I almost wanted to equate it to a grill brush, something meant for scraping decades and decades of solidified junk from metal.