Blood for my Rose |• Crimson Rose series✔️

Chapter 17

America
Arizona
Lake Havasu City.

They used to stay out under the Arizonan  night sky as he serenaded her with reckless melodies. He'd play her favorite songs as she blushed and admired his skills. Flattered her till she completely reddened and chewed on her lips shyly.

He couldn't help wonder where she was. If she could feel the pain in his heart and make it stop. Could she see him? If she was looking over from wherever she was, did she hate seeing him smoke his way out of sadness? Would she worry that he was mindlessly drinking, too? That in this moment, he was a wreck and the man he feared to be? Weak?

His life had been wrecked by the tragedy of losing her, but was it a good enough excuse to drown his organs with alcohol and suffocate them with cigarettes?

He didn't even care being knocked out at this point that the past five most horrible hours of his life played before his eyes which he could see through balls of tears as they hung behind his lids and threatened to pour.

There was no such thing as an unbreakable man. Riley was all rigorous and carefree. Yet when it came to this woman, he was a child in every way. Innocence had slithered through him, denying him the evil of his hunted past. And it was all Rose. She had brought meaning to his existence and had now taken it away with her so harshly, and left him with nothing but the desperation to fill the emptiness of her absence. Not just that, he could already feel his past creeping into his present. He felt hunted.

So he drank some more. As he threw the whiskey down his throat, and the harsh liquid burned down his chest, then came striving to bury the dark thoughts of what had gone wrong.

A world with her gone made him feel lost. He was lost even in this room so small. No, he couldn't dare stay another second in that house alone, so he'd picked the cigarettes—the ones she got him shortly before she left him—the flowers he got her that he didn't get the chance to present, a bottle of whiskey, and he fled the scene like a coward. So be it.

He didn't try to act brave if it meant facing what he feared most; there was no way he'd have survived another second with that memory of her. In a body bag. Zipped and put away to be autopsied. And it certainly was impossible to do it in the house she was cruelly murdered.

He got up from the pathetic spot he had been seated on the floor for the past four hours letting misery make him a companion, and that was when everything rushed through him.

"I loved your selfless courage," he smiled and said as the face of Rose seemed to appear to his clouded vision. Losing balance, he sought the aid of his table and clenched to it for support as he staggered around it. With deceiving vision and a foggy head, Riley found his phone and dialed the only person that could possibly be in the same melancholic state as him.

Jane.

And for the first time since he'd found Rose's body in that damned bathtub, he buried his head in the mahogany desk and broke into a loud sob that led to a fully fledged cry. It was a disheartening scene for anyone, to see a full grown man weep like a boy.

"Hello, Jane?" He said through cracks of sobs. "Are you there?" His words bounced back to him as Jane's own words strangled and died in her throat.

When she opened her mouth and spoke back with a disconsolate tone, Riley lost his last sangfroid and collapsed completely on the desk before him, hurling the contents off to the ground.

"Where are you, Riley?" Jane croaked and burst out to crying, too.

It was one of those moments where people needed the company of a person equally as miserable as them, because they refused to hang up. They both cried to each other, and it felt therapeutic as hell.