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CHAPTER7
Onyx
No,I didn’t want to talk.
Not to anybody.
It was a difficult balance to draw with lives on the line, but I just needed a day.
Just adaywhere I could tune out everything except the war happening in my head.
That shit needed to play out.
So I took the time I needed, giving myself a kind of… detox, from all outside influence. Water for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and an otherwise steady diet of silence. In the room Alicia had set me up in, in the shower, on the roof, in a private pod in the massive gym, in the steam room after.
Silence, to process it all.
This one moment to just…recover.
I never got that, never gave it to myself, at least not until my work was done.
But in my battered state—mentally, physically, and… emotionally, honestly… how the hell else could I keep going? InThe Garden, mental toughness was paramount, the key to getting past anything thrown your way. Maybe I was too far removed from it all or… maybe I’d simply lost the ability.
Whatever it was, I was no longer in a place where I could justdecideI wasn’t traumatized.
And yet… there was still work to be done, so I had to push through it.
Since I could remember, as a damn kid.
Always pushing through it.
I wassotired of pushing through it.
But this is the path you chose.
Even when others seemed so much more enticing.
Putting on a new identity and just fully sinking into it, like it was all I’d ever been. Letting my demons take over and becoming a full-blown villain. Retreating so far into my head there was no coming back out, living my life somewhere with relative tranquility and padded walls.
Or… simply ending it.
Allof those options were more attractive than whatever the hellthiswas—the stress, the anger, the confusion, the betrayal, the…everything.
But…
Shit.
The unfortunate truth I recognized was that this path was the only one that would bring the necessary relative closure before I could ever touch real peace.
I wantedthatshit bad.
If only simplywantingsomething bad enough actually made it attainable.
Nah, not for me.
Never,everfor me.
I’d had to bleed for anything good that ever happened for me, and even then, my having it was usually brief.
