𝐔𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑 𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐊

𝟑𝟔 | 𝐒𝐎𝐁𝐄𝐑

𝐈 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐀𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄 back of my office door for several seconds.

I wait until I hear Aeron disappear.

The minute I know I'm alone, I fling everything off my desk. I stand up and throw my chair across the room, smashing it against the fireplace mantel, and effectively shattering the clay panels that surround the outside. I use all my strength to flip my desk over, then I turn around and send my hands flying out the glass windows until they're running with blood.

I run my arms along the walls and drop the decorative guns, picture frames, and gargoyles, loving and hating the sound of splintering glass and cracked concrete on the floorboards. I act out and destroy every single thing my hands can touch until I'm left standing breathless in the middle of my room, clutching my chest because my heart feels like it might rupture.

I fall to my knees and press my hands to the floor.

Spit leaks out of my lips and spills to the ground, mixing with the blood from my knuckles, creating a perfectly pink concoction underneath me. I feel every crumb of food I've eaten lodged in the base of my throat, and I have to physically stop myself from dry heaving.

It's been a week.

Seven days.

One hundred and sixty-eight hours.

—since the last time I did a line of cocaine.

With my family here, I could do nothing but pretend that all was okay.

After Mason had confronted me about the seriousness of my addiction, I knew I had to be on my best behavior. I had to act as if I wasn't caving from the inside, like my organs weren't betraying me. To make it worse, I had to please them by day, and Aeron by night. I'd have to act fine whenever we spent time together because I didn't want them to know I was struggling—I didn't want her to know how pathetically weak I could be. 

Now I've ruined it all.

From having her close, to sending her far—to pushing her away because I'm too fucking irritated to handle the sound of another person's voice, to wanting to draw her back in—to letting her end our engagement, to allowing her to fly back to Russia with Aeris.

It was all too much.

And I have the attention span to handle none of it.

I whip out my phone and rock back, letting my ass hit the floor. It takes me several tries to see through the daze in my eyes to find Esmeralda's contact to call her. She picks up on the third ring, and I don't give her a chance to get a word in before I'm urging her to come to me.

I hang up.

I breathe raggedly.

Ever since my family left—ever since I shut those doors and exhaled—allowed the stipulations of what I've done to myself enter, I haven't been able to catch my breath. I could scarcely walk up the stairs and make it to my desk. I could hardly handle a heated discussion that I'd started with Aeron because I knew that the longer I spoke, the less I could focus on inhaling and exhaling—and the more she'd become alarmed to my condition.