The Life: Sacrifice (The Life 3)

I rolled away from her, leaving her fast asleep to go back to my room. I didn’t give myself the luxury of looking back at her, not after the sweet kiss to her sleeping lips and one final touch of my fingertip to her brow. I refuse to beat myself up. What’s done is done. I won’t pretend it was all just for her. I wanted it maybe more than she did.

There was no time for sleep. I had to get a move on before Pop caught wind. The pilot had been sworn to secrecy with the lie that I was making the trip to my mother’s hometown to get her a surprise. The ninja turtles were under the impression we were going to finish up yesterday’s tour where we left off, and the others had plans for their last day in the city of love.

A long hot shower helped remove the scent of sex, but nothing could erase the memory from my mind or ease the ache of the scratches her nails had made down my back and on my sides. I got dressed and left to get the others, knowing as I walked out the door and into the car that this would be the last time Gabriel Russo existed.

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FELIX

* * *

Complex PTSD! The words kept playing over and over again in my head, but they made no sense, just like everything else in the last few days. The therapist seems sure of her diagnosis, but how is it possible? I’ve never been to war, never really faced anything harder than Adrienne’s death, but according to the therapist the lawyer had hired, that’s what had caused it. For the past decade, I’ve been suffering from something I didn’t even know existed.

I looked around my bedroom, still not sure why they’d released me. I’d killed someone with my bare hands. I looked down at those hands now, still not quite believing where things had gone. The last two days were still a blur, intensified no doubt by the alcohol I’d consumed before the incident.

There were still a lot of missing pieces. Like whom had it been who’d called me and told me about the fire? No one had come forward to own up to that. The last thing I remember was being at home losing myself once again in a fifth of scotch or was it bourbon, no cognac, that’s right, it was cognac.

Anyway, I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself and bemoaning what had become of my life. It was hard looking back and seeing all of my mistakes, things that I’d overlooked but were so glaringly obvious now, now that the Russos had brought them to light.

I guess I have them to thank for saving my daughter, but what about me? What purpose do I serve in her life after the hell that I’d allowed her to suffer? She was off to Paris with the grandmother I’d kept her from, a woman who’d never been anything but kind to me until Becky.

As I sat there reliving and recalling all that had been, I hated myself even more. I was ashamed to even think about Adrienne, knowing that she would’ve been disappointed in the mess I’d made of our daughter’s life. Just thinking about it had almost driven me insane.

The phone call coming out of nowhere with the dreadful news that the storage unit was on fire and that some woman claiming to be my wife was the culprit had sobered me up enough to get behind the wheel and make it there in half the time it usually took. Thinking of Adrienne’s belongings, her legacy to our daughter, going up in flames at the hands of the bitch who’d already done so much was more than I could take.

I don’t think I went there with the intent to kill, though. I don’t know what I'd planned to do beyond getting there as fast as I could and salvaging anything that had not already been destroyed. But when I saw Becky with that gleeful look on her face, it was the last straw.

I didn’t realize what I’d done until the police got there, and by then, it was too late. She was dead, by my hands, literally. For some reason, the alcohol haze kicked back in, and I was no use to myself or the cops who kept repeating the same questions over and over until the lawyer who I’d never met showed up and claimed he was there to represent me.

It was him who’d insisted on a therapist, him who’d put a stop to any and all questions, and him, a complete stranger in whom I now have no choice but to put my trust. But those words, what do they mean? CPTSD! According to the therapist, who I’ve only seen twice now, my mind had been fractured by the loss of my wife.