I was afraid to read what was in front of me.
My hands trembled as I finally reached for the brown leather book. Shaking, I opened up the first page.
Journal Entry # 35 October, 17 kills
I feel myself slipping into the darkness, and it’s more soothing than the light. I lie to myself and say that I don’t know what I’m doing, but more and more, I’m seeing glimpses of my own actions when the rage takes over. I know what my body is doing, but my brain tells me that it’s necessary, that there’s freedom in taking them out. Freedom in protecting my family and my friends. Freedom in protecting her.
A tear slid down my cheek as I kept reading.
I talked to King today. I kept it from her, who started the fire because I was plotting my vengeance without taking any more of the drug. It’s been a while, and I still have the rage in my body; I feel it in my bones. I don’t know how much longer I’ll still be myself. Will I give in? Am I going crazy? I can only take the medicine for so long before it kills me. The only thing that can cure me is the one thing that’s killing me. Maybe she’ll read this one day and know how sorry I am, but I won’t stop going after them. They tried to hurt my friends. They have to pay.
I dropped the journal. “The De Langes? Is he talking about them?”
King snatched up the journal and flipped through it. “The De Langes have been handled… the people that are attacking us at random and threatening us are a bit more complicated.”
“And you know that how?” I asked.
“I told him,” Phoenix said. “The minute I found out.”
“And?” I looked around the room.
“The Baratta Family’s the threat. They’re back in Sicily and have a few of their men here in an attempt to bully us into allowing them to join the Five Families.”
I snorted. “Like that would work.”
King kicked the chair again.
“Some things can’t be helped,” Dad finally said.
I frowned. “Is this what that meeting was about the other night?”
“Yes,” Andrei said, staring King down. “It was about doing what was necessary in order to bring peace between us. Technically, Maksim has taken out at least seven of them, including the two that tried to burn your house into the ground, and now they’re even more pissed.”
“They attacked first!” I yelled.
“And we responded with a monster of our own making,” Dad snapped. “So now, we bargain.”
“Who’s the chip?”
King scrubbed one hand down his face and whispered, “Me.”
My stomach sank. “H-how so?”
“Marriage,” my dad answered. “Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.”
Revulsion tightened my chest. “Have you all lost your minds!” I shouted. “I mean, seriously?”
“I wish…” King grumbled, his face drawn into a frown, his eyes concerned. “…but my dad has decided for us and I’ve agreed. This ends now. Whatever it takes to keep everyone safe.”
“Whatever it takes,” Phoenix agreed.
Was I the only sane one?
Why the hell did we all sound like Avengers?
This was real life!
“Then now what? What can I do? What can we do?” I asked.
Andrei hurried out of the room like he couldn’t bear to hear anything else while Nikolai gave me a sad look and whispered, “You say goodbye.”
Chapter Twenty
“I felt that I was forced to choose between those two natures of mine, who had memory in common, but did not share the rest of the faculties to the same extent “ —Robert Louis Stevenson
Maksim
My mouth feels dry like I tried to swallow a desert.
I’m tied up—again.
The first time they did this to me was when I stopped taking the fun little hallucinogenic that made me go bat shit crazy—yay for me, I was too late stopping it, and my mind was already fucked up along with my body.
In hindsight, I wonder what this will do to someone who actually does pass the psych test. And in what world would I have been able to pass one after growing up and seeing so much death around me?
I would take no chances.
And I didn’t.
I squeeze my eyes shut as prickles of awareness form over my shoulders and, like icicles, burn down to my fingertips.
“Did you really think?” I whispered. “That we’d let you fucking go?”
Claire squeezed her eyes shut, and a single tear trailed down her face. I recognized it as sadness, but I didn’t feel any remorse. I wasn’t in control anymore—another part of my brain was, a part that told me she’d broken the rules and she had to die.
It was black and white.
Gray no longer existed when I was on JH-40. It was as if I was a different person. At first, I didn’t remember any of the blackouts, didn’t even notice I was blacking out. But I always wrote in my journal the minute I finished, like the insane part of me realized it was important to take notes; again, no gray area, Dr. Blazik said to keep a journal, so I kept a fucking journal, and that never changed no matter how aware I was.