𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐭 𝐋𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐌𝐞

49|| Ghosts From The Past

Celeste // February 27
•••

We're getting closer, and closer, and closer and-

We're here.

We're here and I'm still staring at the wall on my right. I'm still holding on to Dante's bicep as if it's the only thing that could keep me upright.

"Celia?"

Her voice flows through me like icy water. Unwanted and cold.

I look at her then, seeing the man on her side only in the corner of my eye.

She's 23 like me, but the years seem to have weighted heavier on her. Her face seems more mature now, but in a way that makes me wonder if she'd been working long hours at a job she doesn't enjoy.

The golden string of light I always remembered to be surrounding her was now dimmed into nothing.

Nonetheless, she's still beautiful – I fear that's something that could never be changed about her even if she tried – but there are little giveaways, tiny millicurie details that gave the truth of her personality away.

"Comment oses-tu venir ici?" Josette isn't shouting, but the softness in her tone carries the venom and anger in her voice even better. (How dare you come here?)

"Now, now, dear," Tobias says and my nails dig into Dante's black suit jacket. "Let's keep things friendly, shall we?" I imagine him to shoot a smile at Dante but I can't get myself to look at him. "We're all friends here, aren't we?"

I hate him.

The sound of his voice, his presence, his many, many rhetorical questions and the fact that his black empty heart is still beating underneath his ribcage.

"Right," Dante says dryly.

"Please, let me introduce you to my wife, Josette."

Josette looks at the man next to me for the very first time since we'd arrived at their standing table and gasps softly in recognition. "Mr. Alessi," she says, extending her hand.

Dante reaches out to shake her hand and I look away before they touch. Even if she's wearing gloves I can't stand to look at her touching a man.

Or maybe I can't stand to look at him touching a woman.

This is already getting confusing.

They start playing live music in the back, violins, saxophone and some instrument I can't quite place. I turn my head to see what it is, but the stage is too far for me to see. Maybe it's a-

"Focus, Celeste."

Dante's voice snaps me back to the situation I'd temporarily lost attention to and I turn my head back to see two dumbstruck faces.

Josette's face is scrunched up in a mix of horror and shock, but I can't dwell on her expression for all too long, because Tobias chuckles in a way that takes me back to my childhood.

"Nice one," he says lightheartedly. "Very, very funny. He got us there for a second, didn't he, dear?"

I let go of Dante's arm and the same tingle that I get whenever a sniper is pointed at me rushes over my spine and skin as he glares at me.

I ignore him and simply just pull my right glove down to show a scar in the palm of my hand that was the result of Tobias hitting me repeatedly with a ruler when I was seven.

It's only then that the atmosphere changes. Out of the corner of my eye I see Tobias's body tense up like it has never before.

"So it's true then," he says. "You changed your last name and started acting like the psychopath that you are."