To Keep You

Epilogue

If life is meant to feel like butterfly kisses and rose petals upon the skin, then what kind of hell have I been living?

Emotions are like colors; you mix them together long enough. They eventually form an entirely different color, but we still deny the new shade they have taken on and instead demand that the colors are still anger and sadness, not wanting to accept the truth, anger and sadness were never even shades in the rainbow.

They were just victims used to hide the true villain...pain.

My hands were nearly numb as they were bare and defenseless against the sharp late autumn breeze, but I did nothing to aide them and instead turned my eyes away from the red flush the skin of my hands was forming.

It was almost ironic that nearly a year until the date this whole mess began, I found myself at the same place everything unfolded. The lake seemed bigger than I remembered or maybe I was just so hell-bent on dying that its size was lost on me. Whatever the reason it was it didn't matter anymore, no, nothing about that day truly mattered anymore.

I mean of course there were loose ends that still needed to be tied, but thanks to the record-breaking blizzard that trapped Malachi and I, in the haunted house that fateful night, it helped us cover up a lot.

"I keep trying to tell myself you look a lot like our mother, but then I remember, 'oh wait, I don't know our mother'."

The sound of a man's gruff and forceful voice pulled me from whatever thoughts were currently trying to drown me. My back was towards the woods, but it didn't matter where my eyes were, because on the water or on the woods there was only one man who dared to speak to me in such an abrasive way.

"Seth."

Eight months or a century could have passed, it didn't matter. We still were not on good terms and this situation was only leading to one place, war.

Coming to stand next to me in his black duffle coat, his face clean shaved and his hair trimmed nearly all the way to his scalp. He looked better than he did eight months ago when he had just awoken from his coma. 

"Last time I heard you were back in Texas." My words were dry as emotions had nothing to do with our meeting today. This wasn't about fixing a relationship or mending a bond that was never there. No, this was simply a way for both of us to mentally torture each other one last time before parting ways.

This was our finale goodbye.

"Then you would be incorrect." He mumbled while picking an invisible lint off his coat, he was nothing more than a bored cat, and I could barely contain my eyeroll.

"Very well, how is my niece?" I didn't even dare try to remember the girl's name. I had heard it mumbled on the lips of so many around me that it should be imprinted in my brain, but it isn't, and I don't care. I haven't met her, and I doubt I ever will.

I will forever be known as the aunt that betrayed the family for love and therefore, I will always be the villain...

The muscles in Seth's jaw tightened and even though his eyes never left the lake, I knew they burned with anger for me, "I've been in New York City mostly, Olive made a deal with a very dangerous man to get you back and in exchange something very precious to us was taken." His hands fell away from his coat and balled into fists at his sides, "I've been trying to get her back."

It was easy to overlook the fact that he didn't answer my question about my niece when he mentioned a piece of the puzzle, I was unaware of.

Frowning so deeply that I wondered how far my skin would stretch, I spoke in utter disbelief, "Olive sold a woman to get me back?"