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Chapter 28
JADE
Silence.
To some it can be calming while for others it’s anxiety inducing, although to me, it’s fucking endless. To sit in silence is to hear one's demons screaming in high volume, one hundred miles an hour, begging to be set free, to erupt in a wave of violent cries or run wild like an ardent blaze of fury. However, I’ve succumbed to sitting helpless on the floor, tear stains down my cheeks, tasting the saltiness of my tears along my tongue as they fall upon my lips, a shard of glass held tightly in my hand as thick red blood drips down my leg.
The half empty bottle of gin I held firmly in my hand is shattered to pieces against the wall beside me. God how I wish I would have swallowed the liquor I poured in my mouth, letting the bitter taste of juniper and pine coat my esophagus in a blanket of heat as it coursed through. I long to drink myself into oblivion, as I have so many times before whenfeelingsthreatened to peek through the fortified tungsten wall I’ve built around my heart. Made out of the strongest of metals, built to last and withstand everything I’ve been through, but in the end I came to discover it’s brittle, shattering the moment it’s impacted with the simplest of emotions. Love.
To love is to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to live defenseless, becoming an easy target, and being an easy target allows others to take advantage of you. To exploit you for their own gain, and in the end you are left broken and forgotten.
I’ve been broken my entire life, forgotten by everyone I ever once cared about. I refuse to let that be my destined fate.
So I’ve come to a terrifying, earth-shattering, hair-raising decision, a mistake I'm sure I'll one day soon regret, but can’t convince myself not to make. I’m taking a chance onlove, I’m forgiving those who have wronged me, and I will fight for what I’ve lived my whole life believing I will never achieve. A chance to become more than what I ever thought possible. A fearless daughter, a selfless sister, a trusting lover, and the hardest of them all, a devoted mother.
I hear a soft knock upon the door of Sebastian’s bedroom, creaking quietly as it’s pushed open. I’m sitting on the floor at the far right of the room, my back against the frigid wall, with my knees held closely to my chest. The room reeks of alcohol and sex, given the fiasco that happened here just moments ago, and I’m almost positive the metallic stench of blood lingers in the air as well.
I know it’s her, she needs not to be announced nor make her presence known. We have this inexplicable connection, quite like something I imagine twins have where they can feel each other's presence, hear each other’s thoughts, experience each other's pain, and we aren’t even blood. Although, given all we’ve been through together, the similarities in the hardships we’ve endured, we’ve been bonded for life. Tied together with an invisible umbilical cord which at the moment is wrapped around my throat cutting off my air supply as I realize how much of a bitch I’ve been to my one and only sister. My best friend, my onlyrealfamily.
The moment she steps forward, I’m ready to take her lecture, to hear an apology, to hear anything, but what I’m not expecting is for her to drop down on the floor beside me, not caring there is a pile of broken glass, coated with my blood, in a puddle of gin on the hardwood floor. We sit in silence, a mountain of unspoken words floating between us but not one single thing said out loud. Not until her hand reaches out to me, wordlessly asking me to take it in mine, do I crack.
I turn abruptly to her, wrapping my arms around her shoulders and stuffing my face in the crook of her neck. I hear nothing but the loud ringing of my sobs as I cry uncontrollably against her, letting out all the anger, frustration, and fear I’ve felt and kept in for the past months. She holds me closely, her arms wrapping around me as she meets every one of my sobs with one of her own. Our bodies tremble against each other, our breaths in sync as we hyperventilate huffing and puffing in between cries.
“I’m so, sorry,” I mumble, my words barely understandable, snot dripping out of my nose.
“It’s me who’s sorry,” Scarlett mutters, against my shoulder equally inaudibly. I push away for a moment, her clear blue eyes, red rimmed and glossy coated with a pain only someone who’s witnessed all we have, can understand. “I should have never lied to you, should have never kept such a horrible truth from you no matter the consequences. I let my pride get the best of me, let my pussy cloud my judgment, and allowed a dick to take precedence over my sister.”
Suddenly I’m not only nervous but scared, scared that there is yet something she’s keeping from me. According to Sebastian, they’ve known Roman has been back since last November, and I am fearful to find out Scar’s known for that long as well. “Please Jade, just listen to me I promise I’ll tell you absolutely everything, I just need a chance to explain, I’m begging you Jade.”
I stand with my back to her, blankly staring at the wall across from us. I won’t be the first one to speak,I’ve said all I needed to say, it’s her who needs to come clean and tell me everything she knows.
“Last year, for Thanksgiving break, Ace took me to his house for a dinner his uncle had invited us to. It wasn't anything like I imagined, honestly I didn’t know what I expected.” I turn to face her as she continues to tell me all about how her mother showed up and confessed she and my father killed the Mayor of Hillcrest, Silas Smoak, but her mother managed to blame the whole thing on my father. “Ace stood beside my mother and Wesley, Chaz kneeled before him, and this other person, I couldn’t tell who it was, was standing beside Ace. Ace had a gun in his hand pointed at your father, and then…” She stops, her words dying on her lips, but I know what she was going to say.
“You thought Ace shot him?” I ask, knowing that is the reason for her reluctance.
She nods her head, tears springing from her eyes as she steps forward. “I thought I was in love with a murderer, Jade. I was so hurt, scared, but most of all disgusted with the person I had become. I lost all sense of morality because despite what I saw, despite the fact that I blamed my silence on the threats that came after from Wesley, I knew deep down I would never have said a word. I knew then that I loved Ace despite it all and that scared me more than anything that’s ever happened to me.” Her words ring so close to home, mirroring what I’m feeling deep down inside. I know Sebastian hasn’t killed anyone, but I also know that his connection to The Order and Kane Dalton is graver than just some measly security business.
Tears and truths come flooding out as she continues to tell me more secrets than I ever thought possible. From what they did to Drake, to the blackmail against Wesley, to the truth about her father and what her mother did to conceive her. She confessed what her and Ace had planned, how they brought Bass and Beckett in on a plan to trick his uncle and get him into confessing where the ledger they needed to expose him was, down to how Alek, her cousin, helped her escape and save Ace. Most were things I already had heard, but hearing them from her own lips, made them all more real.
Though it wasn’t long before what I feared came out of her mouth.
“The night we went to the cabin, the night of the explosion, that’s when I found out about Roman. He led me to an abandoned cabin, I was running from the Horsemen and he scared them away. He confessed to killing Chaz, he confessed to being here, working for Wesley the whole time, and he also admitted to changing alliances and working for Macallan, well Marchesi.”
I feel a sense of relief she didn’t know for as long as I had imagined, at least not about my brother. It’s like a weight has been lifted off of me, the heaviness I felt on my heart slowly diminishing.
“That’s why you pushed me away, it’s why you left?” I ask, recalling how empty she seemed the night we fought before she went to work at The Gallows with Wesley.
She nods as she reaches out to hold my hand, “I knew I couldn’t bear the thought of looking you in the eyes and not being able to tell you that he was back. I promised you I’d help you find him, that I would use Ace, and Wesley to find out where he was, and once I did, I knew I couldn’t lie to you. So I took the easy way out, the coward's way. I used Marchesi’s threat against Ace as a legit excuse to walk away and save myself the heartbreak of facing you.”
She lied, all of that, everything she said to me was just her way of once againprotectingme. She never turned her back on me, she did it all out of fear, out of sacrifice. My sister, like always, was just doing everything in her power to keep me safe. I can’t hold that against her, I can’t blame her for something I know I would have also done if our roles were reversed.
“I’m sorry Jade, I know I should have trusted you, I should have come clean and together we could have figured it out, but...”
“No Scar,” I answer, stopping her mid apology, “I’m the one who should be sorry. I should have known you’d never intentionally lie to me, that you wouldn’t just keep this from me unless there was an explanation, and I decided to use it all as an excuse to run and hide from my feelings, because I apparently have those now.” We both start laughing, teary, snot filled laughs, makeup probably smeared and faces blotchy, but we don’t care. Wrapping my arms around her, I hug my sister, for the first time in months and it feels so good.
However, the feeling of content doesn’t last long, I shake my head in disbelief, urging her to stop. “No wait Scar, it’s me who should apologize for reacting the way I did. Instead of feeling relief for never having to deal with Chaz or your mother once again, for at least knowing Roman wasn’t dead, I judged you. We promised to never judge each other no matter how terrible our mistakes were, and I betrayed that promise.”
“Jade, please,” she begs, but I don’t let her continue.
