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My feet stop before I enter the hallway. Every single part of my body is telling me not to go in there. But the force pushing me forward is much stronger than muscle and reason.
“STYX!” My lungs burn as I pass through. Despite my earlier suspicions, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a dead person in here.
Please. P-please.I beg the Universe to cut me some slack.Don’t let me find him dead. D-don’t let me find him nearly dead AGAIN!
It’s harder to breathe confined in this space; it makes the hallway feel like it’s twenty-feet long and mere inches wide. The size of my worry is more suffocating than the air though.
Please don’t let me be right.
Not this time.
Not about him.
But he’s fucking clever.
Pinch of thigh fat keeps me centered on the task. I’m not pausing to catch my breath, even though I’m low on it. Pausing gives my body reason to stop, to go into shock. To start freaking the fuck out.
“Styx?” I say as I lower my head and duck into the room. Heat hits my cheeks, my breasts, the back of my throat. Coughing, so much coughing, keeps me from moving forward.
I find the dead person.
Lloyd.
But other than that, all I see are flames.
The window’s blackened from the smoke and the fire spreads over the antique shelves, erotic books adding fodder to the flames.
“Styx?” I manage out through a coughing fit, but I don’t see him. Or any sign of him. My heart meets my gut—the sinking feeling yanks at my hoarse throat. Heat bounces off my cheeks; the light and shock keep me firmly in place.
Seven empty bottles of linseed oil— the double vision may yield some inaccuracy, but one is too many. Rags. I reach for a crumpled-up rag and notice them, loitered all around the room. The floor is full of oil.
Styx did this.
Polished wood shelves. Sheets of dead wood. Candles… accelerant.
How… how… h-h—how—was I so blind?
My breaths hitch. Words come less and less. The more I breathe, the worse things get. Not just the setting, but the turmoil within me.
Again, I let a guy…I can’t even bring myself to say it. I thought Styx was different because of who his mom is, because of the small pieces I saw of him, because I pick the same damn people to fall for every damn time.
I inhale and cough, gagging at the smell. Clutching my stomach, I take one final look around to the ashes.
“I sure know how to pick the fucking losers.” Almost immediately I regret speaking in a room full of smoke, but I do it again, much louder, “STYX!”
I’m not about to enter into an anxiety attack— I’m so fucking there already I don’t see the way out.
I’m momentarily stunned speechless—rendered stupid by a flame. Not the ones threatening and spreading before me, but the Styx-sized spark inside me that had singed my heart, somehow evaporating the reason out of my decisions.
I went upstairs. I left him alone.
And he left me here.
How was I so stupid?
I believed him! I trusted him, and I barely know him!
Had I not just spent the better part of the year, trying to keep the Rosa Negra afloat?
