I listen to my brothers speaking, I listen to Venus. But I can’t focus.
My mind and my body are absent. It’s still stuck in the early hours of the morning replaying the previous hours alone with Beggar. Watching her while she slept.
She resembled a porcelain doll with small cracks, begging to be put together, begging to be saved.
It’s no secret that I have lived in luxury. I’ve lived with riches my entire life. I’ve never wanted, never needed. Until I left home. Until I decided that I just didn’t fit with my brothers and sisters back home in Liston Hills.
I was always different. A fast thinker, sure, but not business-minded like my siblings.
I didn’t see myself living in a high-rise building, wearing a 5-thousand-dollar suit. I don’t see myself as Kevin Stone either, son of billionaire Hector Stone.
And maybe my dad didn’t see it too, because he didn’t stop me when I decided to join the Navy. He didn’t say a thing when I decided to become a Satan Sniper.
My mother wasn’t thrilled, but she’s my mother, she wished me well and just wanted me to be happy. But truth is, I’m not happy. I’ve never really felt anything.
When I joined the Elite special ops, I didn’t get the training the other guys went through to suppress their emotion. I didn’t need it.
I was born this way.
The army said every few years if they got lucky, they would find someone like me. I know Texas is one of those ‘someone’. And like him, I smile, when I need to smile. I joke when I should, but everything is planned out, everything is a big game.
Only I’m the main player, the one who already knows all the moves. Bending, twisting, turning, and eliminating when the time deems.
When I saw Beggar, she was covered with a hoody.
Her actions screamed fear. But like every new piece, I managed to see the cracks.
She let her guard down in teasing peeks, giving me an insight into the girl, she is, was.
Not the broken fragile one, these people make her out to be, a girl haunted by a memory. But the one who killed those men in the alley, the fearless female who would do anything to survive, anything to see that no girl meets her faith.
I saw the girl who survived her entire life on the streets, I saw Beggar. I understand why she chose the name.
Why she chose the hoody.
But there is so much more to her. Beggar is a contradiction. She can’t stand the touch of a male. Yet she chanced secret stares to Zero when he wasn’t paying attention.
It didn’t go as unnoticed as she hoped to. Nor the ones she chanced to me.
I replay the scene that caused my turmoil.
“Thanks.” Her rusty, broken voice cuts the silence.
I stand by the door of her room and watch her pale skin. No flush or embarrassment reddens her pale cheeks.
Her black beaded eyes that I will, for years to come, always compare to my sister’s porcelain dolls, widen when I go to close the door.
“Stop, stay until I fall asleep,” She rasps.
My response is to refuse, but those unnatural eyes hold me at a standstill. There is something in those obsidian hues that say more than she’ll ever reveal.
But a sharp nod from me has her turning to face the bed. The zip of her hoody coming off sounds the air. I walk the few steps to her dresser next to the door and turn the chair to face the bed.
My eyes never leave her as she removes her denim, her naked ass staring at me.
There is no hesitance, no innocence left in her to care for her lack of clothes.
The girl is thin as a beggar should be. She pulls down the covers still stark naked then untwists her long hair until it flows down her back.
I can see the promise of her. But I don’t linger on her body any longer.
I grab a t-shirt from the dresser and throw it at her.
It’s Venus’s and she slips it on before hopping under the covers.
It’s minutes later her breathing changes. The dim ceiling lights show me her form. The long breaths she takes means she’s sleeping.
I should leave now.
But my legs refuse me.
It’s a few hours later, I’m on the carpeted floor, a pillow under my head. My ears are always aware, awake more so when I’m sober. Sleep doesn’t come easy, it never does. The promise of a hot morning lighting up the room.
The sound of choking gets me up on my feet.
What I see before me makes even an emotionless sadist like me flinch in horror.
She’s choking on something in her mouth and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what she’s dreaming about. Her hands are clawing her neck, her legs splayed open.
But what got me, what really fucking gets me even now, is that her stomach’s visible, showing the burn marks over her torso.
My steps are silent as not to wake her just yet.
I need to get closer.
I’m stopped short when Beggar gets up, her eyes wide and alert, her skin misted in a light sheen of sweat.
She sees me then seems to remember where she is.
There are no tears in her depths, no regrets, or emotion besides the labored breathing and red lacerations she made around her neck and chest.
“You have permission to touch me, only you.”
I can tell by her dead stare and words, that this is something important, she doesn’t just give people the rights to touch her.
I give her a sharp nod in response.
For the first time, I’m speechless. Tongue-tied.
And maybe just maybe not as emotionless as I thought.