Behind the Mask | Mattheo Riddle

Chapter 17

My eyes open softly feeling twice as heavy as normal as the light feels like someone is purposely pointing a light directly at me. "Stop it" I groan, moving over in the.

My eyes open quickly as I realise I'm in a bed, an actual bed. "Lucas?" I yell, rubbing my eyes and adjusting to the new light and I take a look around the room. I am in a canopy bed, bigger than any of the beds I've slept in the last few months, softer too. The sheets are buttery soft, comfortable, and black. The duvet a dark green as well as the pillows now rested behind my back.

I look down and realise I've been changed. Now I'm in a pair of long silk pyjamas, a dark green with white embroidery around the edges. "Lucas!" I scream this time, waiting for him to walk through the door and say it was all just a bad dream, but he never does.

Instead, I start looking around the room. To the left of the bed is a door that I walk to as quietly as possible. It opens without a creak which throws me off, everything in this room is so... new, untouched, as if I'm the only person who has ever been in it. Inside the room is a bathroom, twice the size of my old one with a tub twice the size of the one I had in that house.

How the hell did I get here?

I walk back to the bedroom and look over to the large window on the other side of the room which has a small area underneath with blankets and pillows as if to stare out of. On both sides are bookshelves filled with titles I don't remember, one catches my attention though. A beginners guide to the Defence Against the Dark Arts. I pull it out and skim through the pages until I notice a patch of blood on one of the pages. The exact same page I had stained reading it one night after Reg's attack.

But how? I left this at the house the night Lucas helped me escape, the night he saved me. He didn't even know I had this book and the only person who knew I did is dead. "We found it when we searched the place" a familiar voice calls behind me. I turn around and find Draco standing behind me, no longer in his full black attire and no mask.

Instead, he's wearing a simple pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that loosely falls over the top. "Let me go," I say, the anger returning as I begin to remember everything. "This is for your own good, trust me" I laugh out of disbelief. "Trust you?" The words come out more of a scoff but I continue anyway. "You have Kidnapped me, what's next you want me to lay on the bed and take it? Do you want to beat me until I'm shuddering on the bathroom floor waiting for death to take me? Or how about giving me some false hope that one day, I will finally be free."

I stare at him trying my best to keep my gaze cold but as I list off everything that has already happened, that he knew about, tears threaten to breach again. This time I manage to keep them at bay before they fall. "Look," he says with a sigh, taking a step closer and I take a step back. He takes the hint and stops before continuing.

"We tried, we really fucking tried. You have no idea what it was like knowing you were in there, knowing what was happening and that we couldn't do anything. Then, when we finally lost you, it was like a piece of all of us died that day. When you screamed at me to get out, I wanted to take you with me that day, I was going to get you out. I wanted to help you, fuck, we all want to help you. But we can't do that if you are constantly going to fight us. You can be angry, I'm furious. But at least let us help you."

His tone got angrier and angrier with each word, but somehow I know it's not at me, but what's happened to me. No matter how hard I try to be mad at him, how much my mind tells me to. There's another part, a louder part that tells me to trust him.