Passion is the Divide Between Hunger and Need: A Tears of Shame Novel

Chapter 25: Coming to Terms

Caution... this has not been edited thoroughly :( Please enjoy!

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Recap chap 24:

“Ezra, we can’t let him leave! Come on, you have to help me.” She peered at me with desperate, teary eyes before she grabbed my hand and rushed us off toward the palace. We had a crisis to avert and with Lia’s determination, anything was possible.

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Chapter 25: Coming to Terms

Ronan POV

All I ever remembered from the incident with Aria were vague flashes of images and deeply intense urges and feelings. I recalled fabric ripping, muttered screams, blood dripping and the horrified and betrayed look in those beautiful azure eyes. It was chaos, bedlam, but I remembered the fight, the panic and fear. I recalled the anger, the violence and the perverse pleasure. But most of all, I remembered the agony, the loss of trust and love and the overwhelming feelings of helplessness and loathing held in those inescapable eyes.

Those were the things I remembered and lived with for close to 17 years. I had only seen it through my eyes, through what my mind’s broken memory dared recall.

But now, now I had seen things differently. I had seen, no I had experienced what it was like to be raped through Lia’s eyes, through her vision. What I experienced there was brutal and unforgiving. It was frightening, agonizing, body trembling fear. It was all-consuming defenselessness and loss of control. It was powerful and violent pain, so deeply imparted that it tore my blackened soul to pieces and left me begging for death. It wasn’t real, but it sure as hell felt real. It was more tangible, more excruciating and sorrowful then even Aria’s death itself was to me.

I hadn’t caused this atrocity that was forced on Lia through her vision, but I was surely responsible for what I had forced on the woman I claimed to have loved. I couldn’t live with knowing the torment that I had caused both Aria and inadvertently Lia. I couldn’t have lived with that and I certainly hadn’t deserved to.

“I’ve lost Aria and now I’ve lost Lia. There’s nothing for me here anymore. There’s no reason for me to stay.” I choked out in gasps.

I was in the last place I had ever expected to have been, my brother’s arms. The man who loved me like I was worth something, even after all I had done to betray him and his precious, long dead wife. He stood by me, offered forgiveness and attempted to lift me out of my misery so many times now that it was countless.

“I’ll fix this. I’ll make this right Xavier. I’ll bring Lia back, I know she’ll listen to me.” I heard Ezra announce softly and compassionately, but I hadn’t wanted him to fix it, because there was no fixing it.

After what I had experienced, I was well aware that I hadn’t deserved forgiveness and love from anyone.

I hadn’t wanted Lia back, because I knew I wasn’t worth the trouble, wasn’t worth the misery it caused her and everyone else to have kept expending so much effort on someone who was entirely unworthy. I trembled in my brother’s arms. I had never felt more weak and vulnerable. Never been so saddened and consumed, that my tears of shame fell freely in front of everyone, without a second thought. It was unstoppable and unavoidable.

I wasn’t much for crying or showing emotion, but this was overwhelming. I had only ever really cried twice in my life that I remembered. Cried so much that tears soaked my face, not the gentle trickle of a tear or two, like when I confessed what I had done to Aria or when she told us she was dying, but truly and honestly gave in to emotion and cried. Once, when my mother was murdered and then when I watched Aria die. I never thought there would have been agony greater than that. But I was wrong. I had lost my mother and then the woman I loved, and now I had lost my daughter.