The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

2.3 - Sorry

She pushed the door ajar. Braved a soft step across the doorsill.

There was no one in the foyer or front living room, and the apartment was silent—a good sign. Had Ronan returned home and read the note by now, there was no way he wouldn’t be crying his eyes out and causing a scene. Had Axel gotten his hands on the note first, he would be standing at that window on the far wall, where he always stood when he was dark and brooding, nursing a glass of scotch and looking out across the city. Casting a tacit curse on Atria’s shadow, wherever she had slipped away.

She knew these brothers well. She had touched every inch of skin on each of them, and gotten deeply under every inch of both. Emboldened by this knowledge, by the empty silence of the place, she slinked down the hall to her private powder room.

The necklace was exactly where it always was: the bottommost drawer of her rosewood jewelry box, kept at the corner where the marble counter met the vanity mirror. She’d left everything else in the box, all thousands of dollars’ worth—as a rule, she did not take much with her, when she walked out on a man. Generally, none of the gifts the sugar daddy had given her, but only what she’d owned when she first met him. And there was painfully little that Atria actually owned. All of it fit in a small bag, bearing only the barest essentials.

In this rosewood box, the only things she owned were in the bottom drawer. She rarely ever opened it.

She did now. Reached hurriedly inside, knowing that either or both brothers could come any second. Her fingers brushed the velvet lining as she grasped the circular pendant, along with the small folded paper that she kept beside it. She softly closed the drawer. Slid the paper into her coat pocket, placed the silvery chain against her chest, fastened the rusty clasp at the nape of her neck.

Had it been worth it? Turning back, risking so much—for a scrap of paper and a piece of cheap childhood jewelry?

She couldn’t ask herself that question. If it hadn’t been worth it, to her, then nothing was worth anything.

It was done. She was free. She simply had to leave her keys next to the note she’d left for Ronan, and then she could officially abandon this place—this penthouse, this city, perhaps even this country for a while. That could be exciting.

She was in such a rush, so full of premature excitement, that she did not see the dark eyes watching her, reflected in the mirror. The shadow lurking in the doorway behind her.

She flicked off the vanity lights, turned to her right and through another doorway. The shadow followed, unseen in the darkness.

As she entered Ronan’s room, she suddenly felt that she was not alone. There was another presence here. Her heart thudded and sank; she feared the worst. Had she been wrong? Had Ronan read the note, reacted differently from what she had expected? Was he here now? She felt that he was in the room, somehow. And yet she wasn’t sure if the presence was Ronan’s… or if this was even a presence at all…

She ventured a step further into the room. Dared to speak, in a quavering voice scarcely above a whisper. “Ro…?”

No reply. She took another step.

And then she held her breath, as if she knew what she would see when she took one more step and rounded the corner, at which point the whole room would come into view.

The whole room, and Ronan.

Ronan upon the floor, steeped in a sea of red. His own dark blood, too young to have been shed. The sharp blade halfway in his silenced heart, one hand around the hilt, the other hand half open, with a glint of gold and diamond bright against his bloodless palm.

She should have screamed, sunk to her knees, said or done something, anything. But she could not. The sight of blood, spilled in this way, had struck her in a core she never knew she had.

Only once in this life had she ever witnessed death. Once long ago, when everything had been so different...

But this blood was not buried in the past. This blood was here, and now, and on her hands. All over her damned hands.

She stood still, had not moved toward the body, let alone made contact with the blood—but it was on her hands. Not only because she had broken his heart. Because of something else as well, a deeper source of guilt she couldn’t name or understand.

This was Ronan’s presence, the presence she’d felt upon entering his room. Not a presence at all. An absolute and irreversible absence.

On Ronan’s desk along the wall, Atria’s note sat in pristine peace, as if it hadn’t brought about a young boy’s death. She could tell that he hadn’t touched it, hadn’t been able to lay hands on a thing so vile; laying eyes on it had been enough to end his life.

It was just as she’d left it, snow white stained with sinister ink: ‘I’m sorry, Ro. I can’t.’

“You’re not even,” a shadow uttered from behind, voice like an ice axe breaking through her blood red blur.

Some part of her had known that he was here, before he spoke. But knowledge didn’t matter in this blur. She hardly felt a thing, as Axel came up deliberately behind her, seized her neck in a cold chokehold, his grip just barely loose enough to let her breathe.

He pressed his arctic lips up to her ear. “You’re not even sorry,” he hissed. “But you will be.”

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