Chapter 1
Visions of Pain
Ten months…
Ten long months of agonising visions to call company. Visions of nothing but a pain so raw, it shredded my insides every time I closed my eyes. Watching those delicate fingers rip away the last part of me, as if the very memory of me was burning against her skin. I could still see it all, playing out in slow motion over and over. Her arm falling down as her muscles were spent, her fingers momentarily clenching around the necklace, as if some deep part of her didn’t actually want to let go.
But then my world came crashing down around me as I watched the length of it slip through her fingers, only to find a new home in the rubble that was left of our love. A destruction I had not only caused but forced her to endure as her last moments with me.
What had I been thinking? Did I really choose all this just so that my memory could be one of love instead of hatred? Had I really put her through all I had, just so I could claim the right to be held eternally infused within a piece of her heart? But I knew the selfish answer to that question.
And so, I lived with the pain from my actions every wretched minute of the day. Even now as I stood in the wreckage made that night all those months ago, I still couldn’t bring myself to tear my eyes away from the spot where she had once stood, just as I couldn’t bring myself to fix any of it. Because this was the one thing in my existence I wasn’t allowed to fix. And so it became a reminder at just how real this living, breathing nightmare had become.
I walked slowly onto what remained of the balcony. My boots crunched on the glass shards like shrapnel left over from the only war I did not win. All these sights and sounds I tortured myself with everyday as punishment. A prison far more damning than one Hell could ever have imagined for me and this small scattering of evidence was a cruel reminder of my biggest failure all my years had ever known. Simply put…
This was what it felt like to die inside.
“Dom?” I heard my sister’s voice behind me but my body didn’t react. It remained statue still like one of the poor souls of Pompeii and not even the Wrath of the Gods could persuade me to do otherwise. This was what I had become now, this broken shell that acted like this on a regular basis. So much so that my siblings were no doubt immune to my insanity.
When I didn’t answer her she cleared her throat and stepped closer, which was a brave move even for my sister, who admittedly was the only one these days that I didn’t allow my anger to lash out at and attack with a venomous barb. But no one…absolutely no one, was permitted to come out here. For this was the very room where my lies finally crumbled. It had crashed down on the shores of deceit, killing all the hope my Keira had built up like a Gods be damned fortress in Heaven!
“What is it, Sophia?” I asked trying to keep the impatient disapproval out of my voice that came back at me like whiplash when I heard her quick intake of breath. I didn’t mean to keep hurting those that I cared for but when you suddenly hated the world for cursing you for sins that were meant to save…well, then it was like swallowing barbed wire in aid to cure a stomach ulcer… utterly pointless.
“I came to tell you that we’re leaving.” I wasn’t surprised hearing this. If anything I was surprised it hadn’t come sooner. I hadn’t left this godforsaken villa since the day she walked from my life, leaving on the back of another man’s bike. Fucking Viking! If it hadn’t been for that promise I had given Keira then I would have slaughtered…no! I would not go down this dark path again. I would not sully the last thing she ever asked of me with thoughts of death and pain and revenge…not again.
I shook my head slightly as if clearing the sticky remains of my darker days and concentrated on what my sister needed, which was a reassurance she would not believe. But I was her brother and I had to try.
“I understand, you do as you must.”
“By the Gods, Dom! When will you wake up?!” My sister snapped and this wasn’t the first time I had heard Sophia’s temper rise on the matter.
“Sophia.” I said her name as a warning, one I never relished in giving to someone so dear to me.
“No! Not this time, Dom. If this is the last thing I fucking wish of you, it will be in this moment right now and in this moment Brother, I wish for you to know the depth of the mistakes you make.” At the sincerity of emotion in Sophia’s voice I was ripped from my private Hell to witness the unusual sight of tears in my sister’s eyes. The glassy depths I saw there nearly brought me to my fucking knees.
“I am fully aware of the mistakes I have made Sister…”