Two Hearts: The Hunt [Slowly Editing]

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Adrianna's POV

When everything you hate is everything you love, what do you do?

These were the words that echoed around in the destroyed mess that was my mind, repeating themselves over and over as I tried to make sense of reality.

I wasn't sure how long I spent submerged in my own misery. I was vaguely aware of brightness hitting my face from where I sat crumpled on the hard, unforgiving floor, but my legs didn't have the willpower to get up and close the blinds. Instead I allowed the rays of the outdoors to touch the ruby stone on my necklace and remind me of another piece of jewelry that had kept it company around my neck.

With a furious noise of disgust I yanked Caleb's anniversary present off my neck and threw it across the room, the blurred edges of my vision hardly able to focus on where it landed. I shut my eyes tightly. I didn't care. I didn't want to care.

I stumbled over to my nightstand, tripping over the tattered pieces of my angel costume that lay scattered on the floor, and picked up my sketchbook. My hands ripped at the pages, tearing replicas of Caleb smiling, laughing, gazing, into bits and pieces with angry, frustrated grunts and screams.

And then I could feel it again, that same sense of claustrophobia. Life was trying to box me in-I could sense the four walls around me inching closer, threatening to suffocate me via isolation. I felt that block of ice that blocked my emotions break, and everything came flooding in.

Cold tears trickled down from the corners of my eyes and down my cheeks-two sorrowful rivers of melted ice. I gave up on attempting to stop them from falling. I gave up on everything.

The very stitching that had held me together had come apart, unraveling the very framework that made up my existence. I fell apart, collapsed in on myself. I became a piled mess of untied strings and loose ends. I was broken.

Light slowly faded away and soon the darkness greeted me once again, reminding me that time was still a very real thing and that the world wasn't stopping to wait for me to put myself together. But I didn't care about this, either. I didn't care, I didn't care, I didn't care.

I hated it when the night came. Before, back when I was a functioning being, this had been my favorite time of the day. Dark, mysterious, quiet-just how I liked it. But during the days after my encounter with Caleb the werewolf, I had come to loathe its arrival because with it came the persistent moon.

And with the moon came howling. Horrible, ear-numbing, heart-shattering, howling.

Caleb hadn't listened to me. I could still smell him from where I was here at home, a couple of miles east in his apartment. I could sense his movements with my nose; practically seeing him move around during his waking hours behind my closed eyelids. He never once made a move to go near to his border. He defied my order to take heed of my merciful act and flee Fairview Hills to go to his pack. This ignited that same flame of anger from earlier, but it wasn't bright enough for me to find it in the midst of all this grief. I had lost my anger along with my will to live, and I didn't know how to get it back.

Eventually I grew fed up with hearing that ugly, never-ending sound every night. Eventually I forced my stiff legs to get off the floor and walked over to my square window. I opened it and with all the fury I could muster in my cloudy mind I called out to him, sticking my head out the window.

"Shut up!" I screamed out into the night, hearing as my tortured voice repeated itself, mingling with the echoes of howling that I had interrupted. It stopped for a few moments-during which I closed my eyes and let more tears trace the contours of my cheeks-before restarting once again, continuing where it left off like a sad, eternal song.