♫ Elastic Heart - Sia ♫
I thought I’d been low before, thought I’d experienced pain of great magnitude before.
But I’d never been this low.
This broken.
This torn.
So completely shattered to the point only slivers of me were left.
A part of me died the night Roman’s betrayal emerged from the shadows, and although the other half of me was drowning in a deep depression, begging to be saved, I had no intention of rising the stupid bitch from the dead.
After all, she’s the reason why I fell for Roman in the first place.
She wanted love, happiness, all the things I knew weren’t meant to be a part of my life.
But I listened to her anyway.
I let her cloud my better judgement, let her convince me destiny couldn’t be overruled. Let her convince me that what Roman and I had was real.
I let her kill me.
So now, she could rot in hell for all I cared.
The same went for Rome.
Thinking about him was both excruciating and infuriating, a maddening loop that went on day in and day out, even after the relentless phone calls, voicemails, and text messages stopped.
One second, I missed him with every piece of my mangled being, wishing we could rewind time and do it all right from the get-go, and the next I hated him again, wishing him an eternity in satan’s fiery playground as punishment for making a completely and utter fool out of me.
We were going on almost a month of this shit and I was losing my goddamn mind.
I couldn’t take it anymore, had to expel these soul-sucking demons somehow.
Suki and Ramsey didn’t know what to do with me either. They’d tried on more than one occasion to pull me free from the darkness, to help me move on with my life, but their attempts were feeble.
Nothing worked.
Nothing helped.
Except the thought of destruction, of raising hell on earth so everyone could suffer along with me.
Selfish, perhaps, but this agony within me, the malevolent blaze that had festered because of it, demanded mayhem.
I craved it.
The ideas presented to me were insane, deranged, and yet, the thought of bringing them to fruition promised me peace.
A semblance of sanity.
Whether that was a result of the devil’s work or not, I was willing to try anything at this point. I’d sell what remained of my soul to feel anything but this godforsaken torment.
Which is why I found myself outside of Noir Coast one night with two plastic canisters of gasoline in my trunk.
I hadn’t told a soul in fear they’d try to talk me off the ledge.
Consumed by rage, my vision had tunneled on one thing and one thing only, that fucking building. It may not have been solely his, but he’d put his name on it, had helped Vic build the company from the ground up, and that was enough for me.
He wanted to play me, to fuck me over, right?
Well now, I was really going to fuck him.
Inexorably.
Everything he’d acquired and built upon since arriving in Miami was about to go up in sweltering, ruthless flames.
I smiled victoriously.
Heinously.
The mere thought of his demise brought me that inept sense of peace I’d been seeking, one that allowed me to take a deep breath and collect myself before I unleashed the gates of hell.
And should anyone get in my way while I did so, they’d be thrown in the wreckage, too, left to burn alive while the world around them turned to ash.
I took one last look at the solidarity of the darkened building. In about five minutes, it wouldn’t be so dark anymore. Another smile drifted across my face. To be a fly on the wall when he received a call his micro-empire had gone up in smoke…
Stepping out onto the gravel, I shut the driver’s door softly and walked around to the rear end of my truck, popping the trunk open. Inside were the two plastic canisters I’d filled to the brim with gasoline on my way over here. One would be carefully poured around the lower level while the other would drown the entirety of his office upstairs. I wanted everything he owned as decimated as he’d left me—his database, his files, his contacts, his fucking art work.
Everything.
He’d have nothing left by the time I drove off the lot.
I wasted no time after picking the lock and forcing my way inside, pouring stream after stream of gas all over the different stations that made up the ground level. When that canister spilled its last drop, I tossed it in the middle of the room and started upstairs with the other container in hand, taking care to shed a trail behind myself. All the while, every moment Roman and I had shared played in an unsought repetitive loop that made me impossibly angrier.
With an infuriated growl, I kicked his door wide open and took in the sight of his obscure office. It smelled of him and that vexed me, too, because why the hell could I so vividly remember how he smelled? Then it was like his scent flooded me with those unwanted memories, the ones where at our most savage points I’d felt that hellfire rip through my being as those icy orbs possessed me from the inside out.
I laughed softly at my inner-thoughts, shaking my head in only slight amusement. Who the fuck was I kidding? It wasn’t just those eyes that possessed me. It was every-fucking-thing about him.
Those eyes.
That grim smirk.
His unfazed laugh.
His feral growl.
His ability to corner me faster than I could blink.
How from one moment to the next he could subdue me to his liking.
How his hands on my skin stung gloriously like a million taser probes.
The way my body sang the loudest of Hallelujah’s while he impaled me without mercy.
How he made me fucking fall in love with him…
“Ahhh!” I growled again, dropping the canister of gasoline to the ground.
Each tick on the list had fueled my rage to capacity.
I bound toward his desk and swiped everything off its surface in one big huff. Pens rolled on the floor. Papers flew in the air. His so-called antique lamp split in two while the bulb bursted like a bomb. It wasn’t enough to calm me and with my chest heaving, I ripped his keyboard from the monitor and flung it across the room right into a wall. The monitor was next, crashing to the floor with a monstrously loud bang. All his art work on the walls came down, too, the glass of each frame shattering into hundreds of tiny pieces. By the time I’d sent his chair flying through one of the windows, his office was a complete war zone.
And I was about to turn it into ground zero.
I doused everything in gasoline. Every last thing from the curtains to electrical to the contents of the mess I’d made. When the last drop hit the ground, I catalogued this gruesome image to memory and took off down the stairs like a bat out of hell, laughing almost manically. Clearly all the fumes were getting to me, that or the extent of my depravity far exceeded what I thought possible.
In any case, the container held captive in my hand met its pair in the middle of the factory, and without so much as a glance back, I followed the trail I’d spilled upon first walking in to the front doors. Then I pulled a matchbook from the back pocket of my jeans and tore one free from it’s family, meeting the match head to the striker. Seconds later, the smallest flame came life, hypnotizing me with all its layers; golds, reds, oranges, and a small sliver of a blue, each one melding together seamlessly to create a singular powerful source. I glanced down at my converse-clad feet, zeroing in on the shiny path I’d so kindly laid out before them.
Do it. Drop it, the antagonizing demon on my shoulder whispered, In three… Two… One…
So I did.
I took a simple step back, dropped the match, and walked away as that little flame ignited the track that would set Rome’s world ablaze.
What was dark just ten minutes ago was suddenly brighter than the sun, the entire first floor of the building engulfed in wicked flames and smoke as I made it back to the G Class, and threw myself into the drivers seat.
It’d only be a matter of time before the fire spread and fire department was dispatched, and by then I’d be gone, waiting for peace to take me over.
Peace that unfortunately wouldn’t come any time soon…