Lucy’s POV
In the near dark, something warm gently brushed my foot, but the foreign sensation jolted me awake. In the process of shaking my leg, I twisted my ankle awkwardly, and got rewarded with a bout of pain flowing through my limbs.
“It’s alright, I’m not going to hurt you,” a familiar voice said-one too familiar to me that all the wolfsbane-induced drowsiness left my eyes immediately.
It couldn’t be . . . They couldn’t have come for me . . . Could they?
“What-what are you doing here?” I asked Shaun, full of surprise to see him and his brothers chained down to the rocky, imperfect ground as well. I couldn’t quite believe what my eyes were seeing. “You can’t be here.” Maybe I was feeling the side effect of the poison and it was causing hallucinations.
“We came to find you,” Seth said, seated with his legs crossed as though he didn’t mind being chained up. “Unfortunately, we just ended up in the same position as you.” He gracefully undid the knot keeping his hair in a neat bun, and gently shook his hair out. The mane cascaded down and brushed elegantly against his face and neck. I had to force my eyes away from him.
“Why would you all come here?” I looked down at the ground, relieved that I could at least see a little better. “You have no reason to.”
“We do,” said Shaun. He was the closest to me, but seemed to have carefully positioned himself at an angle where he was neither too close or too far away from me. “We do.”
“No, you don’t. So why did you guys come here? To avenge your father? To find the person who killed him?” Bitterness seeped into my voice, and I didn’t try to hide it, I wanted them to hear it-to know the depth of my anger and resentment towards their father.
“I know you won’t want to believe that after the way we’ve treated you, Lucy, but when we got the letter that told us where you were, we just had to come,” said Shaun, with a voice softer than I’d ever heard it. He sounded genuine, but I wasn’t going to overlook all the things he had said and done to me so quickly.
It then dawned on me that I had never even heard him thank me at all for saving his life during all the days I had been in the hospital, and even afterwards. I didn’t need his thanks, because it was my fault for being so concerned about other people’s lives, but if he hadn’t thought it enough courtesy to even show his face once while the person that had saved him from a serious injury, then there was nothing he wanted to say that wouldn have convinced me that he had an ounce of humanity in his body.
I turned to him, fuelled by red-hot anger. “Why? Why did you feel the need to come here? Did you really think I needed your help? Or do you think that you’d be doing me a favour by coming here?” I pressed my fist to the ground
He had the audacity to roll his eyes. “Well, I’m glad to know that you’ve been enjoying your five-star hotel. How’s the food here? Do they have foreign chefs that serve you meals all the way from another continent?”
The anger inside of me boiled to a new level, filling up the deepest parts of my soul.
“You’re despicable, Shaun.” I said the words as harshly as I could, bringing my face close to him so that he could see me mouth every damn syllable. “You come here with your own intentions, and you still have the audacity to try and deceive me that you came here for me. How foolish and desperate do you think I am? Or do you think that I believe in that fluke that happened the other night?”
His face went blank.
But I kept going. “Say something else. I’m waiting. I need you to look me in the eyes and tell me that I’m the reason for you three being here.”
“Lucy, we have been very stupid, we know, but right now, no one here is trying to deceive you,” said Seth after a heavy sigh. “You don’t have to believe us, that’s okay. It would be stupid for us to expect you to be so quick to accept us after what we’ve put you through for the past few weeks.”
To that, I had no responses to offer, but my anger ebbed and then flowed away like a river drawn by the rotation of the moon. I turned away from them all, not wanting them to see all that I was underneath all the anger and pain-a vulnerable woman with a heart that had been torn apart time and time again.
It had been even more crushing to realise that I was finally back in the place I had once called home, and there was no one left to welcome me. The cover that we were in used to be one of my favourite spots when I was younger. Rosa and I would come to the place and stay there for hours simply talking and trading tales about our lives. Other times we would come with our other friends and play games, having a best time of our lives, laughing and sharing good times.
I hadn’t known until I caught sight of a wall where I had scratched in my initials with a rock. The discovery had left me broken once again, and with a newfound grudge with my captor. Just how much did he know me, and why bring me there, out of all places in the world? Was he really that cruel of a person-to be capable of hurting someone in the worst way possible, playing with someone’s thoughts and emotions?
“The tension in this space is so thick I can almost taste it.” Speaking of the devil, the man came into the cove with cool, even steps worthy of a king. He stopped when he took in the middle of all four of us. He kept enough distance away from us to avoid getting grabbed, but he didn’t look scared of the possibility of it. Maybe it was because he knew that with wolfsbane in my blood, I couldn’t do anything to him. The same was likely the case for the triplets.
With the little light coming in through the entrance, the lower part of his face was easier to see, and I realised why whenever I stared at that portion of his face it always looked odd.
Rough, jagged, and raised scars marred his cheek down to his neck, with more of them peeking from under the neckline of his shirt. The wounds must have been incredibly painful at the time, and the fact that he now left them exposed as though they were a badge of honor, said a lot about him.
I noticed that the triplets went very, very quiet-not by not uttering a word-but by the way they all froze up, with Shaun’s face displaying the most shock . . . and rage.
His body shook with the effort it took him to speak. He sounded like a man ready to break apart and burst into a wild display. A man ready to set fire to the entire world and watch it all burn down until nothing but ashes were left. “I-It’s you.”