DECEIT (B723) by Hazel Grace (ebook reader for surface pro .TXT) 📕

“Need to know where the girl is,” Marty presses. “And you got thirty seconds before I let this fuck go another round with you.”

I’m assuming he’s speaking about me, but I don’t acknowledge it.

However, I do recognize the empty pit in my stomach that’s slowly digesting my organs inside and the slowing beat of my heart.

We didn’t need to end like this. I wanted to give her everything, but it’s too late.

You weren’t good enough.

She needs more than you.

You’re too fucked up.

You have emotional issues over a fucking relationship that happened over a decade ago. 

I guess I never fully got over it. I’m a bearer of things that I keep in my closet that I don’t want to collect but never throw out either. A hoarder of emotions and memories that I let run my life and shit.

The kid known as, Mad Dog scoffs, his cockiness breaking through my self-pity. “Fuck you, man. That’s not my business, and if you kill me, you’ll be dead within the next twenty-four hours.”

“By who?” Marty taunts. “Some of the street shitheads you hired to walk around with Glocks? No one is shaking over here.”

“Don’t underestimate me,” he retorts. “I’m not any normal gangsta who runs drugs and guns. I have a lot of power backing me.”

“Did this asshole say, gangsta?” Mills mutters at my side, a lit blunt showing up next in front of me. “Here.”

I pluck it from his fingers and inhale deeply, the smoke lodging in my throat, but I hold back on coughing.

Nah, if I die right now from lack of breathing, at least I won’t have to go one more week like this.

“Go do a round,” Kyson utters low to Mills. “Make sure we don’t have any extra company. Keep the police scanner on.”

He takes off, leaving me his joint as I help myself to another hit.

Then another.

Maybe if I hold it in long enough, my brain will shut down.

I’d like everything to shut down.

Thinking of Emmy with a growing belly, her skin bright and smile affectionate. She’ll be a perfect mother. She’ll love him or her with all she has in her.

With every molecule in her being, she will be there for her whole life and through each trial and tribulation. She’d never let them fall—not for long anyway. She’s mothered all of us on B723.

I just got to experience more.

More than I should’ve.

It was like catching a beautiful butterfly but not feeding it because you didn’t know how or what it needed.

I gave Emmy nothing but my dick, but I tried. I couldn’t make her stubborn ass budge with allowing me to openly announce who she was in my life.

Now I feel every scrape and bruise as I fall, over my head and slamming into the concrete of what is her patience running out.

“Wanna get some practice in?” I glance over at my best friend, holding my compound bow and arrow in his hand.

I don’t hesitant, taking it because it’s a weapon. My weapon of choice when I have the time to use it.

Balancing the lit blunt between my lips, I position my arrow in its spot.

“What are you fucking Pocahontas?” Mad Dog storms, his weight making the basketball rim he’s bound to whine in protest.

We’re at a high school, how fucked up is that?

Pretty jacked if you didn’t clean the blood he’s going to be spilling off the oil-based polyurethane floor.

“Nah, I’m sure she was better looking,” Marty replies, then tosses an aerosol can at me. “Might be a little more satisfying.”

Motherfucker knows me like the back of his hand.

That, and he heard the story of my first kill.

A flick of a Zippo light illuminates at my side and Kyson is holding it, giving me silent permission to do what I want.

What I need right now.

If it hasn’t been apparent already, I’m not myself. I’m going through something. I feel disoriented and off-track.

My heart is breaking, there’s no other name for it. I can’t deny it or change it. I’m not able to let it go. I have to watch it until one of us leaves—Emmy or me.

“Listen...” Mad Dog squirms and Marty steps aside from him to keep from getting any of whatever the hell he gave me off his clothes.

Highly flammable shit—just like my wife and me.

We were fire, never quenched or sated but hungry for more. We destroyed and enveloped everything—each other, our feelings, the way we tried to keep away.

Now, it has to be smothered into embers and eventually die.

“Should we ask again?” Marty proposes.

“I don’t know, man,” Mad Dog rants, jerking on his bindings. “We don’t give names. I just show up at a location that we’ve been holding for over a decade.”

“Funny,” Marty claims with his hands clasped behind his back. “You weren’t even born a decade ago.”

Mad Dog glares at him, confident that he won’t be ratting anyone out tonight, when a second scream fills the air by Kyson’s jagged blade.

He begins to peel away the skin at the shoulder of one of the other dudes that we caught along with him.

Mad Dog immediately snaps his attention to me, skin tone paling a tad, and—damn, I really fucked up his face.

Purple bruises are already forming under his eyes. His nose is still seeping blood and I busted his lips twice. From his nostrils down is a crimson veil of my actions, and it’s only about to get worse.

Snapping the sparkwheel, the spark from my Zippo light comes to life, and talking is beyond overrated at this point.

I shake the can in my hand twice and aim, spraying the strong-smelling substance in the air. Then I hover the flame underneath, creating my own flamethrower. The element reeks of WD-40, and once some of it gets on Mad Dog’s shirt, so do the flames.

He shrills out in horror and surprise, thrashing around to put the small blaze out of his clothes but I shower more...on his skin.

The smell of burning flesh fills my nostrils a moment later and Mad Dog’s screeching