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Past
Kissime
The day I was saved. I often think about the moment he pulled me from the lake and breathed life back into my lungs after my own mother took them out. After breathing in water for minutes on end, she thought I was dead. Success in her need to kill me, she shoved my head beneath the water and left me there to decay.
But I didn’t.
Because I was pulled out with a grip around my neck, lips on mine, and life given back to me. I remember waking and looking up at two dark eyes hidden behind a curtain of wet hair that fell over his forehead. Who was this beautiful creature, and was I dead? I wasn’t sure.
“What’s your name?” he huffed as if he’d just swum a marathon, and maybe he had.
I pushed up on my arms, looking around the place, and tried to piece together the puzzle of what had just happened. “Kissime. My name’s Kissime. Where am I?” I asked, coming back to the boy. He reminded me of a fallen angel. He had razor-sharp cheekbones, a prominent jawline, the deepest eyes, and straight white teeth.
“You’re at The Castle in New York. I’ve never seen you before. What are you doing here?”
He stood up and made his way to his idling bike, grabbing a hoodie from the chair and shoving it over my head. “I’ve never been here myself. It’s—” My mind caught up with me and memories flipped through my brain like a reel. “My mother. She tried to kill me!” I spun around to make sure she wasn’t still there. I was now on the other side of the water, beneath tall trees and thick shrubs.
“Who’s your mom?” the boy asked, searching my features. He did this thing where he’d look right into my soul.
“Delila,” I answered softly. “Delila Petrova.”
I hated those memories. Fuck, but I hated them. Delila hid me all my life, and when I performed the worst thing I could have ever done, she tried to kill me. Discard me as if I was nothing but trash. Until he found me. Keaton put me back in Kiznitch and gave life back to me that I thought I’d never have. He became somewhat of a brother to me.
But now I had to tell him. I had to tell him the full story of what I did that day Delila killed me, and she was back. She was back and ready.
I found his name in my phone and pressed the call button. He answered after four rings.
“Hey, I’m up in the air right now, so I might cut out. What’s up?”
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
There’s a long pause. “So speak…”
“The day you found me at the lake, Delila had tried to get me to agree to put a blanket memory over seven people. I didn’t think much of it at the time. She wanted me to mess up their heads and move memories around and fabricate new ones. I told her no. She tried to kill me and you know the rest.”
“You’re not making sense, Kissime.”
I sighed, patting the head of my cat as she purred against my palm. “Those people—those people were you and the other Brothers, Cartier Nero, Kenan, and Dominic Stranger, I think.”
“Why are you just now telling me this?” he ground out. I could feel his anger through the phone and I didn’t blame him.
“Because I just got the memories back, Keaton. I did it. I did what she asked me to do before she changed my memories to make me think I hadn’t.” A single tear fell from my eye. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’ve just remembered, but I have.”
He hung up the phone and I fell to the ground, my heart splitting open in my chest. I didn’t want to hurt him. I never wanted to hurt him.
Crawling across the ground, I scrubbed my tears away angrily and pulled out a piece of paper. Cartier wouldn’t remember what this was until she read it out loud. She’d have her memories back, and then could unfold The Brothers from there.
The cherry…
Present
I remember everything. The second Kissime cornered me at The Village one day. We had talked for an hour before she did what she did. We laughed. I thought I had a friend. Someone I could be friends with finally after my failed attempts. When she asked me about an old memory that always made me smile, I told her of the story Keaton told me when I was younger, about the old symbolism of a cherry. “In our messed-up way, the cherry will always symbolize mine and Keaton’s bond. We grew as a pair from the earth and shared the same flesh and blood, but when one is disconnected from the other, we will eventually rot and die. I’ll rot… and die.”
“You…” I point toward her. “You made Dominic want me. Take Eli as a distraction, all while you what, Delila? What was your plan at the end? Fucking power?”
Delila cackles a laugh so evil it leaves teeth marks down my spine. “You’ve had it all from the beginning, Ice Queen. You had the respect from The Brothers, you had the adoration from The Fathers, you had the protection from The Mothers, the love from your sisters. You have not known pain. Not true pain. Not the kind of pain that Midnight Mayhem took from me.”
“Delila.” The word catches in my throat. “Maya is in such a good place. I can’t have her knowing what you have become.”
