The Lonely Hearts Club

Chapter 74: Training (Hades)

All I want is for Bree to be happy, that's all I want.

She's not happy right now.

She sits in the passenger seat of my car, her arms wrapped tightly around her body, head resting against the glass.

We had a long conversation about everything that's happened in the past few months, discussing the same points over and over until Bree finally stopped crying.

"I wish we could run away," she says, words slurring slightly.

I know we're both thinking of the last time we tried to do that. I know we're both thinking that now it's impossible for us to ever get away.

If I think about it too much, an uncomfortable heavy feeling settles on my chest.

"We're trapped here, we have no choice...it's not...it's not..." she trails off.

"It's not fair," I say and she draws in a shaky breath.

"It's like we're on a carousel, going round and round in circles but we can't stop or leave it." She says.

"I'm sorry angel," I say. It's because of me that she's dragged into this mess.

"I wish we could have met in different circumstances." She says quietly, and I get the feeling that this is something that has been on her mind for a while now, but she hasn't wanted to say.

"Me too angel."

I wonder about a life with her outside of this organization. I'd just be a security guard for a club or a bar, and that's it. That job would be how I'd get my paycheck, all the money I'd have would be from honest work, not from money laundering or whatever the fuck.

Bree could work at her art gallery and we'd live in a small house, probably something the size of our bathroom. Maybe we'd go out sometimes, or maybe we'd just chill together.

I want that, I want that so fucking badly but we're never going to get it.

*

After a few days of thoroughly talking through everything again and again, Bree is back to being happy and carefree.

Sometimes at night, we'll talk about how bleak the future looks, but at least we have each other.

I didn't realize just how messed up my friend group was until Bree became a permanent fixture in my life.

I actually don't know how I can survive without her. I didn't think I'd ever get to the point where my love for someone would be so intense, I couldn't be able to go on living without them.

"Come on Madden," Joey says.

He always uses my last name when my training gets intense, it's to impersonalise me and make him feel less guilty about his methods.

My wrists are chained behind my back and I'm warily eyeing the opponent who's sizing me up. I can only use the lower half of my body to defend whatever he does to me.

He's a little bit shorter than me, but he has a knife. I have nothing. He has a crooked nose from where it's obviously been broken and never set back in place and a tattoo of a lion on his arm. It's a fucking terrible tattoo.

"You can't rely on your arms," Joey says. "Imagine you dislocate a shoulder, what will you do then? People want to kill you."

I let the man man lunge for me, I let him slash my abdomen with the knife, ignoring the burning that spreads across my skin. He sees the blood pouring out of me and blanches.

Using this distraction to my advantage, I knee his wrist before he recovers and tries to slash me again. The knife flings out of his grip and his eyes flash in surprise.