Deception. Betrayal. Mistrust.
It seems the closer Rayne gets to the truth, the more she finds herself wanting to run away from it. It's complex and terrifying-more than she ever fathomed.
New family members, good and bad, pop out at her like a br...
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𝗠ason wasn't sure who the person looking back at him was supposed to be.
Eyelashes fanning the shadows of his damaged face, his eyes scoured the length of his sickly, pale skin. Thin slashes of red, newly scabbed over, littered the entirety of what he could see. Flexing his jaw, he winced at the undiluted aching rupturing from the stale bruises drawn over it—he floated in the pain he constantly received in return for denying any medication.
Plum-colored rings swooped under his eyes, rounding up and around his left. His orbital bone was smashed, leaving a shattered, protruding thickness to his flesh that could not be maimed. He blinked at his cursed reflection—at the injuries that proved what had happened to him had not been a nightmare to wake up from, but a reality he tried to run from.
He could not stand the sight of himself.
Blood suffocated the former whites of his eyes, dimming the baby blue irises he'd said hello to for the last twenty-one years. There was no window to his soul. There was just an unrequited dullness that stemmed from his lack of recognition and filled the innards of his heart.
The car accident was a translated text tattooed to his insides.
He was a monster even Victor Frankenstein envied.
"Are you sure you're ready for this?"
Mason pulled his eyes away from the mirror and glanced to his right, catching the gaze of his friend. The almost silent buzz of the clippers brought him back to the present and away from the past and future. Her hand gently curled in the strands of his hair—the last pieces of the pact he'd made to himself—the desire to not cut it since his father died.
His fingers, dismayed and devoid of their usual polish, automatically reached for the thin scar tracing from behind his ear to the back of his head. An operation that had given the doctors permission to shave the last thing keeping him attached to the kid he used to be.
It had been a slap in the face when he'd woken up yesterday. When the lucidity had come in screaming like a burning Phoenix, and the cold of his inner child's absence drifted lazily just below it.
He had become so bleak.
So incomplete.
Like the pieces of him he'd clung to were worth nothing more than an unconsummated death inside sterilized waste baskets. Like his dues and recreations had murdered him without the mercy of sending him down the spiraling void of black uncertainty.
"No," Mason cleared his throat, realizing it'd been minutes since she asked.
"You don't have to do this," she offered, "There's no problem leaving it as it is."
Mason allowed his eyes to rise to the mirror once again. He stared at the half of his head that was no more than a centimeter of a freshly mowed lawn and blinked at the other side of thoroughly overgrown weeds. For the last time in a long time, he nipped at the front ends with his pointer and thumb, closing his eyes and breathing easily.
