KY$ ✓

Twenty-Three | Kill Christakos

SOTC: Him And I by G-Eazy (with Halsey)

She knew.

Tearing at my brain with the metal teeth of the rapid raccoon at the trailer park my rental car was in (who I swear to The Holiest Divine Raptor Jesus ate metal because that bitch was a hybrid goat) were those two words. Both my eyes consumed a thousand miles away like I was shell-shocked.

Like I spilled the blood coursing through my veins on a battlefield.

But that was why she said, "You're a pathetic sociopath for wanting a bullet in your head."

Because the fuck I didn't.

"Your turn, Clara."

I snapped back to reality and quickly placed a red five, my only card, into the stack of the given UNO pile. Achilles's jaw dropped and Basil let out an, "YOOO!" And with a flick of the wrist slapped his cards on the floor.

"Good one, Clara!" Ada exclaimed.

"Damn, she got a 666 IQ," Calix laughed, reaching for a high five.

"Hey, uh- I'm going to bed," I just said, forcing a grin on my face.

Ada raised her eyebrows, the essence of her face seeming taken aback. "Oh ok," she got out as Calix put down his hand.

"Aight, good night," Basil said.

"Night, Clara," Achilles seconded.

I forced the corners of my mouth upward before getting up and leaving the room.

I tried taking quick breaths as each foot raced past the other down three grossly beautiful moonlight-casted quartz hallways. Fog of untranslatable thought choked my brain like a weed cloud.

Suddenly, a grab on my shoulder sucked the breath from my lungs before I found a maid behind me.

"What are you doing up so late?" The pitch in her voice was high like a Disney princess's, like that fourteen year old one who got kissed as a dead corpse in the woods by a grown man.

"Nothing," I muttered. "So I'm guessing you need me?"

"Xerxes wants to see you now," she said.

Uh- what?

Before the shock could settle in, though, the maid jolted my arm forward and compelled me to follow her through halls I never had the iota of thought to do through before we reached a cream door at the end of a hallway, whose walls donned intricate paintings that made the Louvre look like my sister Anna's elementary school art show. The maid swung it wide open.

Noir walls morphed into a mafia-core bedroom. A floor to the higher than clouds ceiling sized window extended across two sides of the room, the city lights outside of it visible in a distance between the thin, grey chrome curtains. The lights resembled the vibrant chandelier casting light on the black chrome furniture, especially an ottoman of the same shade. Along with the ottoman, two vanities bordered a bed layered in a grey comforter and numerous angelic light pillows.

Xerxes sat upright on the bed, his hazel eyes tunneled on the verizon of the massive glass window.

"I am leaving. Goodbye," I heard the maid say, and not a second later her faint footsteps faded out of earshot.

I am leaving. Goodbye. If I died in that school bathroom the day my juvenile education center got invaded, those should've been my last words. If someone heard me as I did it and recorded it, I could be called the Deleted NPC-

"I was an executioner."

The brain proposition dissolved like vapor as Xerxes again as he furthered:

"When I was drafted, they told my family I was going to give soldiers therapy. But one step into the Athens Base, I was dragged into a room, where an officer shoved a Beretta M9 in my hand and said, 'Kill, Christakos.' He pointed at an American captor chained to the wall who hadn't blinked in days. I just laughed; I didn't believe him. Suddenly, he was booming at me until I heard it: my finger pressing the trigger, a scream of bloody murder, and his brains blowing out. And then I puked all over the floor.