Page 134 of Inflict

His leather jacket was missing.

An extra set of keys for the brownstone were gone.

She’d left a coffee cup, stained with creamy rings, in the kitchen sink, along with the spoon she’d used to stir the drink. Her book, one she’d just started reading the morning before, was still sitting on the coffee table in the living room. Her drawing, the feather on the wall that she hadn’t finished entirely when he had gotten home the day before, was done, and so beautiful, her name scrawled at the bottom.

Like a goodbye.

Connor stared at the feather for a long while, longer than he probably should have, before he was even able to look away. To finish that piece, Evelyn must have gotten out of their bed and worked on it through the night before … leaving.

He walked past the kitchen table three times before he saw the note.

Please don’t be mad, Connor.

I left something behind, and I have to get it now. I made a promise, and so did they, so I’m going to follow it through now that I can. I’ll be back, when I can.

I’m sorry, and I love you.

—Evelyn Sasha

Connor wished, after reading the note, he could say that he felt better, or that he even understood why she had up and left, without so much as an explanation to him before she went away. And yet, he was left more confused than ever, more hurt than before, and so alone.

Shite.

He’d been alone his whole life anyway.

Always getting hurt.

Abused.

Neglected.

This shouldn’t have stung him as badly as it did—he shouldn’t have felt like his entire being were ripping apart at the seams the longer he stood there, reading the same words over and over, until they bled together into nothing but ink blots.

What was so important to her that she had to go after it?

Why did she have to do it alone?

More than anything, Connor was pissed off that Evelyn hadn’t given him the benefit to even tell him those things. And when that rage came … when his anger finally leaked through the shock enough for him to react, his chaos exploded around him. All the confusion and hurt and anger inside came spilling out, like a hurricane ripping from his mind, releasing hell and devastation on anything within reach.

He loved his brownstone.

Each item, every piece inside, was something he had carefully picked or made himself to decorate the rooms and the walls. It was his only safe haven, the one place where he could be just him, where he didn’t have to feel alone.

Yet, he did.

So, when all of the sudden, it felt like a prison to Connor, lashing out at his favorite, comforting things was the only thing that made sense. By the time he was done overturning furniture, ripping his canvases from the walls, and shattering his knickknacks on the floor, he was left standing in the middle of his own loneliness.

It was his chaos.

And he was still so alone.

• • •

Connor tried to chase Evelyn for the first two months after she had left. He’d even done so, to his own detriment, leaving his business uncared for, and his newly-overturned organization without any sort of stable head of the family to keep things under control.

He hadn’t known where to look for her at first, except for what she had said, and the things she had written in her note. He’d gone back to the Russians, because if she had left something behind, perhaps it was with them, even if that had been a risky move on his part to ask a distrustful, bitter Bratva for help.

He’d found none, either way.