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He shoves a beer in my hand before falling onto an armchair. I pop the cap, taking a large swallow of the cool liquid. It slides down my throat easily, warming my chest against the chill I’ve been feeling for the last few hours.
Since the moment I saw Fallon stepping out of the lift on our floor.
“Did you see her?” Kyle asks, as though the fucker can read my mind.
“Yeah, got a glimpse when she arrived.”
He nods but says nothing more. He doesn’t need to.
My history with Fallon is complicated.
Once upon a time, she was my best friend. It was expected of us growing up that we’d be close, so our parents practically forced us into friendship. Though it wasn’t much of a hardship. The girl worshipped the ground I walked on, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do the same for her.
Somewhere along the way, things changed.
I changed.
I found a world of darkness that sucked me in. Blood, violence, destruction. It’s hard to say where the urges came from. The first time, I was eleven when I broke another kid’s nose. As the blood poured, my eyes followed its every movement. I revelled in the way the crimson liquid stained his skin.
Since then, I crave it. Need it. Almost as much as I need my next breath.
The next time, Fallon got the brunt end of my urges.
She had been playing on the swings with my brother when I felt something I couldn’t explain. An ache in my stomach that made no sense to the eleven-year-old boy I was. The sudden need to get her away from my brother had me moving before I could even think about what I was doing. My arms reached out and suddenly she was on the floor.
Tears in her eyes and blood staining her knees from where they had scraped across the concrete. When she looked up at me, her eyes were worried but there was something else in the background.
Fear.
She looked at me as though I was the devil.
It was beautiful.
From that moment, I spent every waking moment imagining new ways I could taunt her, to recreate that look.
I’ve left her alone mostly, for the last few years. Let the distance between us grow, but now she’s here; I’m ready to reel her back into my web. She has no other choice if she wants to survive what comes next.
She might think of me as the devil—and maybe I am to her—but she’ll learn to obey and follow my rules. If she doesn’t, I don’t want to think of what that means for her.
TWO
Thesoundofmyphone ringing echoes through the almost empty bedroom. Most of my furniture hasn’t arrived yet, so the room is bare and lifeless. I drop onto the double bed, the only thing already in the room when I got here, glancing at my mother’s name flashing across the screen.
My thumb swipes over the screen, answering the call, but I don’t lift it to my ear just yet. I can already hear her shouting down the receiver, no doubt having a go at me over something I’ve done that I don’t even know about.
“Hello, Mother,” I finally say, pressing the speaker and lying back on the bed. I stare at the cream ceiling while her shrill voice fills the room.
“Where the hell are you?”
“At university, where else would I be?” I ask with a sigh. I can imagine the venom in her eyes as she shrieks down the phone. Me coming here has been a point of contention between my mother and father over the summer. My parents separated a couple of years ago but still live in the same house and attend all the same functions as though they are an actual couple.
As far as most people are aware, they still are a couple.
It’s only me, their daughter, that has to live with the vitriol between them and listen to them fighting over stupid shit day in, day out. It’s one reason I didn’t fight my dad too much when he told me I was attending Eyam.
I don’t want to be here, but it’s got to beat being stuck in the middle of the two of them.
“When you come home next, we’ll be having words about this arrangement. I don’t like it, and I had other plans for you this year,” she says.
