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Chapter Fourteen
VERA
The rain that comes plummeting down from the sky couldn’t be more fitting for this day. I’m standing in the end of an alley while my legs are frozen in position. No part of me dares to move as my eyes have just landed on the body I know so very well. I feel void, like nothing inside of me is alive. I don’t hear my heartbeat, or feel my blood pulsing through my veins. At the sight of her my entire being went silent. Almost as silent as every man surrounding me is, awaiting my reaction.
Waiting for my pain to come barreling out of my body.
Rain drenches my entire body,, and before I know it, I’m soaking wet. Still I’m unable to move, barely able to think and don’t know how I’m still able to breathe. Never in my wildest dreams did I think a nightmare such as this would come to life. I thought I did everything to prevent it, but obviously I was wrong and I failed.
I failed Olena in the worst way possible. I regret every decision that I’ve made regarding her treatment up to this point. I should’ve encouraged her to stay in rehab longer, maybe if I did that I wouldn’t be staring at the lifeless body of my best friend.
“Vera…” Rhys’ voice tries to come off soothing, but it isn’t. Nothing is soothing right now. Instead I feel like he is trying to rush me along, like we have better things to be doing. We do have things that need our immediate attention, but all of it can wait. I’m too busy punishing myself for not doing the things that I should’ve, for not being as strong willed and pushy that I needed to be. “None of this is your fault,” he whispers, wrapping an arm around me from behind.
I rip away from his touch and whip around to face him. All of my hidden emotions coming out of nowhere. “Every part of this,” I whirl my hands in the direction of her body, “is my fault. All of it. There is no question that I am the guilty party here.” I walk away from him and approach her body, kneeling on the ground to see how her color has already faded. She couldn’t have been dead for more than a few hours, but yet all of the life has drained from her body.
I kneel down and run my hand along her soaking wet face, looking over her features. She may have been my best friend, but she was so much more than that. Olena was my sister. Neither of us would’ve survived our tragic childhoods without the other. We’d been through the best of times and the worst, not really sure how we made it through.
Throughout my entire life I never knew what a family felt like until I met her. Not until I was homeless, starving, and met a smart street girl who knew where we could get our next meal. It was only the kindness of a little old woman who worked at a restaurant near the city center that kept us alive. She’d feed us scraps, and we’d take anything we could get. I’ve only ever had to exist in a world where Olena was by my side, if not physically, in my heart.
Now...how am I supposed to live in a world without her?
His hand meets my back in a soothing, circling motion. “I know what you’re doing. You want to blame yourself for this, for this tragic thing that has happened because you need someone to blame. You refuse to blame Olena for her actions, and I understand that ,but Vera…” Rhys pulls my face to look at him. “None of this is your doing. You gave Olena every resource that she could’ve needed in order to get clean. You gave her the chance, the opportunity and the support. Please, you can’t blame yourself for this.” I hear the encouraging words that spill from his lips, but even understanding the logic of what he’s saying doesn’t make me feel any better. My heart is being ripped apart, shredded to a million pieces. My best friend is dead, and I don’t know how on Earth I will ever be able to cope with that.
Honestly, I don’t think that I ever will be able to.
