Wake

Chapter 4

It happened too quickly for me to grasp what was happening. It felt like everything within my body surged against me at once: my heart, speeding, thudding painfully against my rib cage, my lungs, running out of air, my mouth, opening in an agonizing gasp. Sweat beaded on my forehead, turned my hands clammy, chapped my quivering lips. The water was reaching up, dark and menacing, beckoning me back to its depths.

I was on my knees, gasping, coughing, trying to calm myself. I was dying. Again, I was dying, and again, there was no one there to save me. I was alone.

"Vince!"

There was a distant call on the wind, but I was too delirious to make out who it was. It was highly likely it was a figment of my imagination; I screamed, trying to gain my sanity back, curling myself against the wood. It was cold. Everything was cold, cold, cold, my fingers, my toes, my heart. It was that night, all over again, all control slipping from my grasp.

"Vince!" screamed the voice again, and then there were arms around me, pulling me back to myself. I blinked, the terror slipping from me, my heart calming, the breath returning to my lungs. My hair hung in sweaty clumps over my forehead; I looked up through my eyelashes at the face of my brother.

"Cian?" I managed.

He'd obviously ran out here in a hurry, his hoodie only halfway on, hair mussed, medical eyepatch loosely tied. "Hey, I'm right here. Vinny?" he said, then exhaled, shutting his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, the horror within them had evaporated. "Thank the—heavens. What was that? Are you okay?"

No. I definitely wasn't. I hadn't felt anything like that since my nightmares, which I had thought ended a long time ago.

But I was tired of having other people worry about me. For once, I wanted to be independent. I said, still a little out of breath, "I'm fine."

"You were screaming," Cian observed, skeptical. "People who are fine don't scream like that. If there's something going on with you, you can tell me, Vinny."

I stared at him, his arms still holding me up. The stars highlighted something in his one good eye; I wasn't sure what, but it was hesitant, as if there was something he himself wasn't saying.

I sighed, then reached up, tugging his eyepatch loose.

He cursed under his breath, immediately reaching a hand up to cover his wound. "Vinny—"

I gripped his wrist, and he opened his mouth, watching in surprise as I pulled his hand back down. "No," I said quietly. "Stop hiding it."

He watched me as I lowered his hand, his mouth in a deep frown. The dock was firm underneath my knees, the only thing stable about it all.

A ragged, pale line of flesh was left where Nick's knife had sliced his skin, the edges of it still red and irritated, forcing Cian's eye half-shut. The iris, or at least what I could see of it, was a washed out version of the sapphire it had been before, an eerie bluish-gray. The pupil seemed to have been swallowed, the scar in its entirety stretching from his eyebrow down to his cheek.

Cian made a disdainful noise in his throat, pushing away from me and tugging his eyepatch back on. "Happy?" he said, practically spitting, as he got to his feet. "Another one to the collection, right?"

He stood tall, but his shoulders where quivering, just barely. I knew my brother. I knew when he was hurting, even if he never wanted to say so.

I stayed seated upon the dock, my heartbeat still slowing to its normal rate. Crossing my legs underneath me, I leaned my chin into my palm and said, "I don't understand why you're mad. There's nothing wrong with you—the scars don't matter."
"I'm just tired of it," he snapped, his back to me. "I'm just tired of losing."

"Winning all the time would get boring, don't you think?" I responded, and he glanced over his shoulder at me, raking a hand back through his hair. Though I could tell he was fighting it, there was the slightest of smiles on his face.

He bit his lip. "I'm still going to wear it."

"I know."

He frowned, then reached his hand down to me. I accepted it, letting him pull me up to my feet. I staggered a little, and he watched me, but I regained my balance before he could say anything. "You should sleep," he advised as we began to make our way back towards the house. "It's almost three in the morning."

"I can't sleep," I answered. "I've tried."

He cut me a sideways glance then. "Vinny—"

"So, are you ever going to tell me what Caprice said?"

Cian stopped walking; I was a few paces ahead of him before I realized he'd halted. When I glanced back at him, he was standing there, hands interlocked as he cracked his knuckles, finger by finger.

His voice was as dim as the night around him. "It's nothing, Vinny," he said.

"It's nothing you'd understand."