Saving Isadore [MxM] (An Alpha's Fight Book 1)

Chapter 36

A/N: A song to complement the chapter. You can listen at the same time or listen afterwards and read the lyrics! ❤️🥹

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AARON • POV

"Isadore?"

I clutched the phone up to my ear, the cool screen pressed flush against my skin. I was sitting on my bedroom floor with my back pressed against my bed, my knees pulled protectively to my chest, a heavy blanket wrapped around my shoulders in a futile attempt to warm up, despite not being able to for the past few hellish days.

"Aaron," Isadore responded, his soft voice hesitant and I instantly felt tears spring to my eyes at the familiar sound, pooling along my lash line and threatening to spill over down my cheeks. My throat was tight with raw emotion, as though there was a swollen ball of tortured feelings and unspoken words lodged there, unable to get out, choking me.

"How are you?"

"Me?" I sniffled, with a humourless laugh, despair and heartbreak tearing through my chest like a stabbing knife. My voice was trembling and unstable, despite my hardest efforts to hide the intensely sufferable feelings raging through me. "Don't mind me, I want to know how you are, honey. Talk to me. Tell me where you are and what they're doing to you. I just need to know that you're okay."

"It's not too bad here," he said, as though he was lost in thought, his voice hesitant and far away. "My cellmate is okay, he doesn't talk much and he keeps to himself. And it's quiet for the most part, which is nice. They let me write too so I can send you letters. There's just... a lot of doing nothing I guess. And you're not here. I miss you."

The tears did fall then, trailing down my face in large, salty trails, the droplets dripping off my chin and splashing against the blanket around my shoulders and chest. I didn't bother reaching up to swipe them away, knowing it would be hopeless. They'd just keep coming.

Five years.

Isadore had been sentenced to five years in prison for second degree murder.

One thousand, eight-hundred and twenty-five days behind bars.

I still couldn't accept it, still couldn't truly believe that he really was locked up and I wouldn't be able to hold him in my arms or kiss him or run my fingertips through his hair for five whole fucking years.

It felt like a lifetime. To me, five years without Isdadore was a lifetime. 

The day we'd found out, I thought I'd have a heart attack. I was so enraged, so devastated, so unbelievably in denial. I'd thought that this was all a horrible dream and had been pinching myself hard enough to draw blood, pleading with my mind to stop playing sick fucking games and let me wake up beside my alpha in a world where none of this ever dared to happen.

That of course wasn't plausible because this was our brutal, absolutely harrowing reality. And I had no choice but to face it because there was no going back.

What made it even worse, was that we were told we should be grateful it was only five years and not twenty or life. Isadore had been let off easy - too easy according to some insufferable people.

'Some people' being Landon and Nelson's parents who'd been overly vocal about how their son's didn't deserve to die and Isadore was a danger to everyone else in society because of the brutal way in which he'd killed them. They'd desperately tried to put my alpha away for life, despite every horrific, disturbing act their own children had committed, which consequently led to their own deaths.