Grey Testament ✓

Twenty-Nine | Grey Testament

SOTC: Glass House by Machine Gun Kelly (ft. Naomi Wild)

"Get up, come on," Kolzyn whispered, touching my shoulders.

I rose up from my arms like a baby deer, whimpering. He grabbed my left hand and put his arm under my right one. He sat me down on a little bench I was too distraught to realize was right next to me. Then he sat on my right, wrapping one huge arm around me tightly.

I closed my lips to breathe from my nose. Kolzyn grazed a finger against my sleeve up and down, his palm still. Slow tears pricking the corners of my eyes streamed down my face as I made littler and littler noise. Eventually, none at all.

Kolzyn's rising and falling chest soothed every part of my being. I've never felt so safe in someone's grasp in my life. Because suddenly, it was as if I forgot all my troubles. Every fear that overtook me in these months. All the hate I harnessed in my heart just turned to dust, like all my dreams were of all the times he saved my life, with the clouds weeks ago and his embrace now.

Just like he took them.

I shot up from the bench, staring at Kolzyn in horror. He jolted in surprise as his arm and hand retreated to his chest.

"What?" he asked.

"You tricked me," I whispered.

Kolzyn's lips parted as he just stared at me.

"I— what?" he goes.

"YOU TRICKED ME!" I shrieked, launching my hands at him. Kolzyn blocked himself with his arms from my strikes before he hit me with a wind-knocking push. I stumbled onto the floor before scrambling onto my feet again.

"Use your words. What are you talking about?"

"It was just like you did for the Barons, acting like a coward!" I continued. "I should've known that you were going to do the same to me when you got me to trust you! Asking me to hang out with you and getting me to call you during what I just went through— it was an act so I'd trust you!"

"I act like that so I can keep my job," Kolzyn gasped. "Why would I trick you?"

"Because of who you really are," I muttered.

"And what am I, Daphne?"

"A KILLER!" I screeched. "You're a fucking killer who ends people's lives for money, and you love it like a hobby! There is nothing left in your soul but somehow you're kind to me and listen to me and be good to children and imitate empathy. Life has thrown me a pregnant sister who might die soon, and you're the most confusing thing of all! So why do you think you've tricked me, huh? HUH?"

I sucked up my breath. My emotions charged me so profoundly with electricity, hailing the damage of my first ever snap for answers this damned year on a heart that has suffered too many blows to expectedly keep on beating.

"Why are you like this?" I finished with a sob.

Kolzyn didn't look at me. Pastel green eyes had a staring contest with the ceiling as he seemed to freeze in his position.

So I waited. I waited and waited for him to respond or make a noise or even make a movement. But he gave me nothing.

"I hate y—" I began.

"My dad was eighteen."

He broke his gaze with the ceiling, looking forward.

"He was with his friends, partying it up at a bar with fake IDs. That particular night he took home an older-looking chick, something he never did. It was consensual. A month later, he opens the door to the sister of the chick slapping him in the face and telling him a thirteen year old is pregnant with his child.

"After getting over how mortified he was, he got this feeling. The next day he find the sister who leds him to her, and he gives her money. My mom thought it was abortion money, which was fair. But instead he gives her that and a deal: if she keeps me, he'll support her through the pregnancy. His friends thought he was out of his mind, but he said he had a gut feeling. Nine months later I was born.

"And Kay Bishop was the best dad. We watched movies together, our favorite one being Lethal Weapon, and he was a rocker. So he'd bring me into the studio to play on his guitar sometimes and we'd sing together with his friends to impress girls. And he was protective of me around his friends. One of them accidentally shot me with a BB gun and my dad lost it on him. It was funny as hell. But the best thing was that every night before he tucked me into bed, he'd tell me he loved me and that I was in the best thing that ever happened to him.

"I was nine. We had just left our house because he got a gig at a bar, and we saw this group of guys. I didn't know what they were doing, but my dad did. He looks at me and tells me to go back inside the house. I did as I was instructed. He went up to them and next thing I know, they're attacking him. He tried to leave but they pulled out their knives, and I watched them mutilate my dad outside my living room window.

"When the guys ran away, I ran to him screaming. Red hair, eyes stabbed out, and cut out lips was all I found on the upper portion of his body I had to search for under a dim light. The hand he tucked me to bed with was three feet away. And he choked up his last few words, 'You're better than this shithole, Kolzyn' Then he told me he loved me and that I was the best thing in his life for the last time before he took his last suffocation.

"So I vowed to get out of there. You needed money to be granted access for servitude on the Elite side, so I scraped it everywhere I could get it. It used to be by stealing my mom's change as a kid after she'd do a job. When I got older, I washed cars. Nothing made enough, though. Then me and one of my dad's old friends, Cal, were offered a deal by the bowling alley owner. These three guys robbed his place and terrorized the customers. He, being a pacifist, offered us stacks of money to convince him out of the neighborhood.

"Cal and I found the head guy, and we attempted a reasoning. But then out jumped the other two guys and a war began. Cal and I tried to leave before I remembered that night at nine years old. So I did something different. And as my first kills lied dead around me, I had the greatest business idea ever.

"So I became a hitman. Everyone in the neighborhood feared me and the desperate paid me to kill them. Child abusers, robbers, lowlife parents, rapists, alcoholics— but who will all never love a child the way my father loved me.

"That's why I saved you. Why I agreed with your captor that I was evil. Because everyone in this world is as vice as they can be virtue, a combination of black and white. So we are all testaments of grey, whether we present the lightest or darkest shades. And if a nine year old doesn't have to endure their dad die bloody and blind because of me, I'm fine with being a darker one.

"Does that answer your question, Daphne?" Kolzyn finished with a smile and a tear.

I didn't pay attention to the more down my face. All I could do was tackle Kolzyn in an embrace as he rolled his head back, shouting I was sorry.

It was the only thing we could both tell you happened that night until it seemed as if one night or a thousand years passed by, and everything went black.