Consumed » Kai Parker | Rewritten

Seven

"Kill me."

I'm back in my childhood home, straddling Kai with a knife clutched in my trembling hand. The universe had given me a second chance, or perhaps it's the Devil this time, leering at me to stray from the moral path.

Kai Parker embodies the Devil like a second skin, as he angles his neck like an offering. Imploring me with his eyes, and with two, demanding words, to decide on his gory fate.

"Please," he whispers and my glare falters at the uncharacteristic plea. There's an eager, desperate gleam in his blue eyes, spurred by the prospect of his death finally coming to claim him.

"You'll just come back."

"Maybe not if it's you." His eyes fall shut and a sick smile widens his lips. "Maybe you're my way out of here."

"Not like this." I can hardly believe I'd gone from holding him at knifepoint to trying to ram sense into him. "We-we're supposed to..." I trail off, bewildered, as my memory utterly fails me. What the hell was our plan? What else was in store for us, besides eternity alone together?

"I'm supposed to die," he says, his smile fading. "And you're supposed to kill me. There's a pretty symmetry to it, Charlie. You can have my spot in 1994. Travel the country. The fucking world. Burn down the Empire State and then rebuild it, I don't care, just–fucking do this for me." His eyes open, so he can pin me with a stare that still manages to be cold, in contrast with the raw desperation of his spiel. "Or I swear...I'll be your worst nightmare."

Only the child-murdering sociopath could ruthlessly twist a plea for death into a threat against my life. Only a man driven so far beyond the boundaries of reality, of hope, could.

My brain was a blank slate, occupied only by the sight of Kai Parker, willing to succumb to my knife. Everything before this moment was a haze of gray, indiscernible. All that mattered, apparently, was that everything had come down to this state of desolation. To the boy who'd played with death so many times yearning for its permanence.

"Please, Charlie."

Even he has lost the energy to cling to threats.

"I...can't, Kai," I tell him and try to drop the knife. But my hand is suctioned to it, immovable.

He knows what's coming before I can understand it myself and his eyes shut again. A small smile curves his mouth.

Like I'm a puppet attached to the strings of an angry maker, I've lost motor function in my hand, can't even feel it shaking anymore. Screaming out a futile protest, I slit his throat.

I jolt awake with a gasp.

Tempering my erratic breathing, I register my surroundings. The car ceiling, then the windshield–the shine of the headlights expose a dirt trail leading to a massive gate where's a break in the tree line. Not the endless highway that I remembered from...what felt like minutes ago.

How long had I been asleep? Must've been sometime after Kai's gruesome retelling of the time he found a guillotine in Washington and decided to hold a medieval execution for himself, where he played the judge, jury, executioner, and the persecuted. I sorely preferred when I was ignorant to the fact that Kai couldn't die in the prison world. At least the not-knowing had temporarily saved me from a never-ending selection of disturbing stories about suicide attempts.

It was no wonder I'd been burdened with such a strange dream. Despite how casually Kai had spoken of his demise, I shudder violently at how vivid the sight of blood spurting from his throat had been.