Heartless (Merciless 2)

She’s not broken; a woman like Aria can’t be broken. A voice whispers deep in the back of my mind, where it hides in the crevices. And the smile that begged to come out before forces its way to my face. I can only hide it by kissing her hair as I rub soothing strokes up and down her bare back.

“You’re fine, songbird,” I tell her, and I know she can feel the hum of my deep words with her face pressed so firmly against my chest. “It’s only the adrenaline.”

She doesn’t move from her spot, but her lashes tickle my chest as she opens her eyes and then blinks. Her breath is hot and her nails scratch lightly against my skin, but she doesn’t ask the question on the tip of her tongue. How do I know?

Her hands continue to shake as she attempts to inch even closer to me. With her refusing to let go of me, I reach down and pull the covers tighter around her before telling her my story.

Not all people are made to be killers, but sometimes even the sweetest of creatures have to murder. I may not have ever been innocent, but there was a time when I wasn’t the callous and brutal man I am today.

“The first man I killed was a bartender named Dave,” I speak quietly without pausing my strokes along her back. Kissing her hair again, I stare at a sliver of light that flits across the bedroom floor. I only know Aria is listening because of the flutter of her lashes again. “I was sixteen,” I confess to her as I’m taken back to that night.

“My father didn’t deal with my mother’s impending death all that well.” A huff of ludicrous laughter makes my shoulders shake and her body moves with mine. “He was a coward, I know that now, but to face the deaths of the ones you love… well, I can’t blame him for being a coward, but I can blame him for bringing me down with him.”

“What happened to your mother?” Aria asks gently, and her soft breathing is steady. It’s only then that I see her shaking has turned into a slight tremble.

“She had cancer. It took two years to kill her.” The memory makes my chest feel tight, but I continue with the story, the one that makes me angry, not the one that I don’t have the strength to face. “My father couldn’t stand to see how she deteriorated. So, he drank himself into the man he was without her.”

My gaze drops to the comforter. “I swear he was a good man with her, but knowing he was going to lose her changed him.” My voice lowers, and I force aside the emotions that come with her memory. To vanish into the back of my mind where they belong.

“One night, my father got himself into trouble and my mother was barely breathing.” The image of her on the hospital bed they’d sent to our home for her hospice care causes my voice to crack, but I don’t think Aria can hear it.

“He hadn’t been home in nearly twelve hours and I knew she wasn’t going to make it much longer.” He knew too. He had to have known. We were only boys and even we knew she was going to die. “She died while I was away looking for him.”

Aria’s grip on me loosens, her nails trailing on my chest as her head lifts to look at me. I can feel her gaze on me, but I don’t return it.

I can still hear the way the fall leaves crunched under my sneakers and feel the way the water from the earlier rainstorm seeped into a hole on the bottom of my sole as I trawled through the alleys looking for him.

“He used to go to a few bars I knew.” I was young, but the bartenders knew me by name at that point. Aria doesn’t stop looking at me, and I feel vulnerable and exposed under her eyes.

She makes me weak.

“I found him in the bathroom, beat up pretty bad. He said it was the bartender. I forget what excuse my father had, but then he cried and said he couldn’t move. He cried and that’s something he never did. He always drank away his pain. They beat him up and then cuffed him to the radiator, so they could come back and do it again. And again. All the while my mother waited for him.”

Aria sniffles against my chest and whispers an apology.

As the memories come back to me I tell her, “My father was a poor excuse for a husband. And even a man. But what they’d done…”

I can’t explain to her how the anger spurred me on. In the moment that I thought I was going to lose both of them in one night, the anger is what kept me from breaking down.