𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐲

Chapter 70

— Chapter 70 —
The Remedy for a Troubled Heart

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J A M E S

There it was.

The voice I'd waited five years for. The same voice that helped me find a path through the darkness I used to know. The one that I fell in love with.

It was a shot to the bloodstream. A tonic for healing; a sound that made me forget my own aches and pains. More than that, it was a gesture of acceptance and forgiveness, holding its arms out to comfort my uneasy soul.

I listened to it and my surroundings bled away into nothing. The crowd, my family, the bride and groom, and the few people willing to call me a friend. Keeping up on the piano, muscle memory came as a saving grace, because there was no chance I'd have remembered anything with the trance that Elliot's voice had me in.

All I could see was him.

We weren't in a ballroom anymore. We were stupid teenagers again, playing gigs for any stage that would have us. Two people bonding over a shared love for music away from the stresses of the outside world. It was as if I'd never been gone—like nothing had changed.

Elliot had one hand on the black stand, another gripping the handle of the microphone. His plush lips were so close to it that they grazed the cold metal.  Moisture glistened at his cheekbones. The soft curtain bangs of his hair fell loosely over his eyebrows, touching the eyelids he'd rested gently shut, whilst he sang the lyrics to a song I was so grateful that he'd remembered.

Our song.

We wrote it together not long after his mom passed. Everything from the lyrics to the melody served as a cathartic release, built out of love, focused on love, because it was love Elliot needed when the only parent who truly cared for him was gone. That was all our music ever was: a means of letting out our frustrations in the only way we knew how.

Elliot needed this release because of me.

Because from his perspective, I betrayed him five years ago. And he didn't have to say it out loud for me to see that pain reflected in his eyes. He was a constant balancing act—keeping me at arm's length, too scared to let me in again, yet continuously falling victim to his own curiosity and a fear of being alone.

It was my fault that things ended the way they'd had between us. I was the reason that Elliot was so high-strung in my presence.

He feared my anger.

An inescapable rage shrouded my mind. Sometimes it roared like a firestorm. Other times it was the crackling of a dying flame, simmering just beneath the surface, volatile yet constant. Deep red, the colour of blood, it forced me to view the world through a scarlet lens.

Since I'd been a child, that fury had corrupted me from the inside out. A child screaming and kicking and crying out for someone to help me. For someone to care. For my parents to notice that Midas—the visitor they let walk through the halls of their estate during the night—was taking advantage of my vulnerability. But nobody did anything. Nobody ever did anything. I was a child, and they broke me.

I was supposed to have cut myself free.

I did everything I could to escape those people and the ropes they pinned me down with. I was supposed to be free. I wasn't meant to be poisoned by so much rage. That anger I felt as a child wasn't meant to follow.

It ruined everything.

All it took was a single difficulty or inconvenience for me to lash out blindly—my own temper trying to protect me from dangers that didn't even exist by any means necessary. Shouting. Screaming. Vicious words. And I couldn't calm myself down in time to prevent the consequences. I couldn't recognize the state I was in until the damage was already done.