𝐏𝐈𝐄𝐑𝐂𝐄𝐃 // 𝐇.𝐒.

47!

Chapter 47

HARRY

SEVEN YEARS AGO

The suffering felt never-ending.

From the moment I was born, I had my fate of constant pain guaranteed. It's as if I was forbidden to feel a single ounce of joy. Whenever I did feel happy, I learned it was temporary. The more I smiled, the less it lasted.

I was going to tell her how I felt.

The teasing, the shoulder brushes, and the way I would catch her already staring at me had told me enough to know she had a crush on me, too. Flawed, I didn't care if she was seeing somebody else. He didn't treat her right, anyway.

Nervous hands were tucked into the pockets of my jacket and my overly grown-out hair was tied into a bun when I approached a tragedy.

Shattered glass underneath my heavy boots cracked with every step I took into the tattoo parlor. Then, on the ground and before my eyes, my friends lay in a pool of their own blood. Chaos and crisp calamity surrounded me, but all I could look at was her. Her pearl necklace had been torn from her neck, scattered on the bloody floor, and I was numb.

They never told me, but I had my suspicions of the verboten activity whenever they bought expensive things. I knew that the scene of this massacre had been because they messed with the wrong people. Though, I kept quiet so that my shelter with them would last.

I chose survival over grief. The world was out to get me, I concluded, when it killed the only people I considered as my real family. With the sirens sounding from a distance, I couldn't stick around. I had to leave rather than mourn. I simply didn't have time.

I stepped over their lifeless bodies to get to the safe in the closet of the parlor. Having given me the code a few weeks prior, I started to believe they were preparing me for this. So, I let the shoulder strap of my backpack slip onto the floor. After unlocking the safe, I stuffed the money into it.

The sirens were now piercing through the room, alerting me that it was my time to leave. I slammed the closet door shut and I avoided looking at my dead friends. I stepped over them again, zipping up my backpack because death didn't scare me.

She died. They died. We all fucking die, eventually.

There was no point for me to mourn. Why would I let it hurt? I'd give fucked up fate the pleasure if I wear to shed a tear—at least, that's how I've always seen it.

With the backpack hanging from my shoulder, I ran to get the hell away from there. I ran so far without a clear direction of where I was heading, but somehow I ended up in California.

It was far and it was also the next international flight available. Besides the shit I heard about Los Angeles in music, I didn't know much about it. I figured it would be the place where I could have a fresh start, a clean slate with a fictitious past if I had to tell it. Little did I know I'd be arriving into the gates of hell, meeting with the devil, and selling my soul to him.

He disguised himself well.

Within the first hour of my arrival, I was stripped of everything I had left. Conditioned to take it like a man, I let three random men mug me. I took the beating, withholding the rage I had bundling up. I didn't cry about it. I remained so numb, I don't remember if the pain was insufferable. I just remember laying there, bruised with fractured ribs under pouring rain that washed my blood away. I felt nothing.

But then he found me.

In the cold, Dante stepped in front of my shivering body and offered me a hand. He sought medical attention for me and I was given shelter. I didn't understand why a stranger was helping me. I didn't understand that his act of kindness was more of an investment.