TROUBLE , kaz brekker

xiii. was I not supposed to say that out loud?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ECHO CADDEL HAD AN itch she couldn't scratch.

Something had worked its' way into the crevices of her mind, nestled deep in the folds of her brain and had sat, waiting, for the perfect time to sink it's claws in.

She wanted a moment of peace, was that really too much to ask?

But instead, Echo would wake when the moon was still high in the sky, paralysed by something that sat heavily on her chest. She didn't scream, didn't cry, she couldn't find the words to call out for help because there was no air in her lungs nor life in her chest. And so she lay for a while with her green eyes shut so tightly it hurt and begged her mind for relief.

When the pressure finally relented, dawn crept up the walls of her little room on the bottom floor of the Crow Club and Echo finally stumbled to her shaking legs. They gave way beneath her and if it wasn't for the hand that clung to the wooden frame of her bed, her scabbed knuckles pale in the morning sun, she would have fallen to the ground completely. Truthfully, Echo didn't know if she'd have had the strength to pull herself to her feet again. Everything was harder these days. Twenty years of life felt like a thousand.

But then there's that damned itch.

It was erratic, demanding and quite frankly, annoying.

Echo told herself it was normal. For a time, that was easy to believe. But nothing about the way she'd snapped the night before felt like normalcy. Instead, it felt dangerous, addictive, free.

She'd never seen red until she watched Kaz confronting Pekka Rollins and the urgency of it all made her mind snap,  like it had splintered into different pieces and by the time it had reformed there was a body between her feet and two shattered hands on either side of it. There was Jesper, pulling her to the side. She'd tried to shake him off. It didn't work. She felt incoherent with rage and then Kaz had pulled her in front of the Kaelish bastard and she'd felt coherent with rage and finally, the itch was satisfied.

Except now it was back. Echo swung one leg in front of the other and tried to cross her dimly lit room.

The bruises around her neck ached with every movement and strained and cried against every breath every motion. Each sharp stab of pain was a reminder of the night's victory. The bruises on her knuckles were a reminder of what it had cost.

With both hands on either side of her porcelain washbasin, Echo Caddel looked in the mirror and tried to find something she recognised. She had no such luck.

"Get a grip." She muttered to her warped reflection. The reflection stared back.

But then the redhead remembered that only insane people talk to themselves in mirrors and only the more insane of that bunch actually wait around for a response. So Echo quickly put a stop to that. She was awful company anyway.

And she looked like shit. Purple bags sat heavy under her eyes and complimented the ring of bruises around her neck. Echo sighed into the mirror and watched her shoulders rise and fall, before scraping the hair from the back of her neck and securing it with a tie, hoping against all rationale that she could lift the heaviness from her mind with the same ease.

Because, for the first time, Echo could feel herself losing her grip on the only thing she'd ever truly been able to control: herself.

And it was terrifying.

She laid her forehead against the cool marble of the washbasin. Fucking Kaz Brekker. Life had been so much easier when all Echo cared about was herself.