Sweet Devil [BL]

Chapter 146. White Eyed-Wolf PART II

"I know, it's just...."

Jake sighed. When he compared the current Tristan to the Tristan of his previous lives, guilt tugged at his conscience. If only he had paid more attention to his little brother, things would have turned out differently. But he had been a coward, too afraid of his mother's ire to do anything. He convinced himself that Tristan was doing fine when he wasn't.

"I think Tristan resented me for leaving him alone and not taking care of him. He had always craved my love, but I never gave it to him for fear my mother would lock me up. And after puberty, he tried to get my attention however he could, using my mother's nasty tricks. Only, what started as a desire to make me acknowledge him turned into hatred at one point. Well, that's how I see it now."

"From the way you talk, you don't seem to hate Tristan."

"Oh, but I did hate him! I hated him for a very long time," Jake scoffed. "I thought of him as the same as my mother: a monster."

"Then... what changed your mind?"

"This lifetime," Jake admitted. "And the fact that I had children in my other lives. After being a father and raising kids of my own, I learned a few things, and I started to ponder what I could have done better. I don't remember how many times I doubted and asked myself "what if I had done this" when thinking back on Tristan's childhood. That's why I'm grateful to Gabriel and Misha: they do wonderful parents."

Stephan burst out laughing at these words, and Jake smiled slightly. Angela had let her younger son in Gabriel's hands to monitor him, unaware that his presence was filling up the kid's empty heart. Tristan had also grown fond of Misha, who significantly influenced the boy's personality over the years.

"But I guess you won't tell me about the nasty things Tristan did?" Stephan asked, stretching a hand to stroke Jake's cheek. But Jake raised his hand and caught his mid-air, preventing him from touching his face.

"And what good would it do to tell you? I don't want your perception of Tristan to change because of events that haven't happened and probably won't happen in this life."

"Come on, you know me well, don't you? Whatever you say, it won't change how I behave around him, I'm not—"

"Fine. I'll tell you one experience, but only one," Jake interrupted, tightening his grip on Stephan's hand until the bones of his fingers seemed to crack. "Once, he hired thugs to beat me up. Nothing too bad here, and nothing new either. The problem arose when they shoved live crickets down my throat. Did you know that if you swallow them without chewing them, crickets or similar bugs will cling to your throat and trachea? This is because their legs have little spines that allow them to attach themselves to your windpipe and esophagus walls. And, of course, you can't forcefully shake them off as you would with your hands as they're stuck inside you. The fun thing is that they block your windpipe once they cluster together, and you can't breathe."

Stephan's face grew paler.

"You see, I didn't know that either until I was brought to the hospital for surgery because said crickets clung to my windpipe, gathered together into a small cluster. I was barely able to breathe by then."

Jake stopped talking, his lips trembling. The fear he had felt at the time was creeping up on him, making his voice shake. He couldn't speak well for months afterward, and every time he breathed, it was like swallowing a mouthful of burning ashes.

Even though Jake knew his brother was behind the incident, he couldn't prove it. The police wouldn't care that Tristan had been walking around the house with an insect encyclopedia days before the incident. They also wouldn't care that the teenager often opened the page to reveal colorful locusts and showed them to Jake with a smile coated in poison. It was just a coincidence.

The police officers had already apprehended the thugs, who claimed they had been high on drugs and just attacked the first passerby they met. They all said something along the lines of: "Shoving insects down someone's throat seemed like a fun thing to do, and, dude, I didn't even know crickets were such sneaky bastards. I'd have taken something else otherwise! Like worms, maybe. I don't know, man."

Still, the police investigated, but they didn't find anything suspicious: there was no sudden transfer of a large sum of money in the aggressors' bank accounts or their family's, and thus they most likely hadn't been paid to assault Jake. Their urine tests also revealed traces of drugs. All in all, Jake was only an unlucky victim, and whatever else he said was due to shock.

To say that Tristan had made his life a living hell was an understatement, for this was only one of the many things that had happened to Jake. His past two lives were a little different, but the experiences were just as traumatic either way.

"You're right, I was better off not knowing that." Stephan gritted his teeth, sitting up to drag Jake in his arms. "I'm sorry, I'll listen to you next time. I won't insist again if you don't want to tell me something."

Jake snorted but didn't refuse the hug. Instead, he buried his head in the crook of Stephan's neck and closed his eye. 

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Edited by Clozed!

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