Touch

Chapter 34| Progress

"I killed Aaron."

All I could think of was his mangled body that was splayed across the living room floor that night.

The nightmares I had.

The sheer terror and agony frozen on his lifeless face.

How I worried over pain he must have have gone through.

How I lamented for all the things we'd lost.

The guilt I felt for moving on.

"Solina?" I heard someone call me for me in the distance, but I far too engrossed in what I had experience in the years since Aaron's death.

"Solina?" The voice I repeated, as I thought of all that time.

So much pain. So much time...wasted.

"Solina?!" He screamed as a he shook me by shoulders with a force that startled me from my thoughts.

"Hey! What was that? Where did you go?" Malachai asked frantically, holding my face as he searched my eyes.

"I don't care," was all I could manage to say.

"What?" He asked as confusion marred his countenance.

"I don't care that you killed him. In fact, I'm thankful you did. You freed me from a prison I didn't even know I was in. I'm just the fool who spent the last two years mourning it...mourning him."

"No, don't do that, don't go there. You didn't know."

"Why did you kill him?"

"Because he and his cult hunted anything that that they didn't believe was normal," his eyes grew dark with the memory of the past.

"My mother. Elaine."

And there it was.

"The Brotherhood killed them?" I asked for clarification. He only nodded as a lone tear slid down his cheek.

"When I lost her," his voice shook as he forced himself to continue, "It was like I'd forgotten how to breathe, my heart," he paused for a moment trying to collect himself, "It forgot how to beat. It was an agony like I'd never felt.

If I could just claw it from my chest, if I could just end it all," he said as he placed his hand over his heart, "But I couldn't, through all of the pain I knew my sisters needed me. They were young and to have lost my mother and father, I couldn't leave them to.

I had to think of the pack as well. Elaine would never forgive me if I gave up on them, so I had to survive.

Every waking moment since her death was just pain. Physically, mentally, spiritually, I just hurt so much, and then Freelah made me this ring," he showed me the obsidian band that adorned his right ring finger score continuing,

"To it she bound a piece, a very small piece of Elaine's soul and the moment I wore it, the pain stopped, but that in of itself was it's own form of torture because she was here and she wasn't all at the same time.

I couldn't see her, I couldn't touch her, couldn't hear her laugh. I could just feel her, and it wasn't enough. It would never be enough.

So I took all that pain and all that darkness and focused it into action, into revenge, and I spent the year after her death ending every last one of them.

Aaron was the mastermind behind it all, I saved him for last so that he knew that I was coming, and there was nothing he could do about it.

I wanted him to know that I would find him, and that I'd make him feel everything last bit of pain I felt!" He shouted as he slammed his fist into his chest with a ferocity that was bound to break bone if he persisted.