Capture Me

Doubts

Ryder

The way she confidently smiled despite her bloody lips, irked me.

I stood a couple of steps in front of her.

She looked nothing like I remembered. The sweet looking teenager before was gone, replaced by a crazed looking woman. Her nose slimmer—pointier, her eyes, once a vibrant blue, now dull, couldn't focus and was moving from side to side. She was thin and sickly pale and far from the Cassandra I knew.

"What happened to you?" I couldn't help but ask. I once cared for this person because of my wife and my emotions seemed to have leaked out from the box I temporarily kept them.

She sneered, "You happened, Ryder." Her hateful act changed into a sad one in a flash. "I told you I loved you so many times, but what did you do? You casted me aside like I was nothing! I liked you first, but you just had to set your eyes on Thalia!"

I had to raise my eyebrows at that, I wanna pity her, but the things she had just said were fucking ridiculous. Even if I met Cassandra first, even if I met Nara five years after high school, I would've still chosen her. Over anybody.

Her mood shifted again. "Oh, and before you use those kinky tools on me." She all but purred, as she eyed the sorts laid on the table far from her on her right. "I just wanna clarify something. I do not have any connection nor my family to that whore wife of yours—"

I backhanded her, making her head whip to the side so fast that I worried I broke her neck for a second. She had the nerve to say that despite the cruel thing that my wife had to go through on their hands. "Explain," I gritted. It took all my fucking will not to crush her throat and just let her die right there. Nobody plots to kill my wife or call her a whore and gets away with it.

She chuckled and turned to face me. "She was adopted, my parents were forced to take care of her because her fucking drug addict of a mother left her and took off to God knows where," she spat, scattering bloodied spit on the floor. "And her father," She laughed humorlessly. "Nobody knows who he was because her mother fucked a battalion of men!"

The girl had already lost a few screws in the head. I clenched my jaw, breathed in the antiseptic smell, and reigned my itching fists. The revelation shook me and snapped the puzzles that mysteriously appeared in my mind the day I met my wife. Still, the uncertainty about the information was still there, the woman was looking crazy for Christ's sake! I never doubted that Nara was their own, because I saw the semblance of her known mother and father clearly portrayed on her face, it was just how they flipping treated her. I never figured out the 'why' to that, until now.

I didn't talk, I let her say what she wanted to say. She might slip and give up the time and location of the trade without even realizing it. I walked to the table where the tools were spread.

"Do you know why they kicked her out of the house after graduation?"

My hand glided on each of the weapons aligned on the table.

"Because I told them a secret," she giggled. I didn't look at her but I imagined her smiling with all her bloodied teeth, which was surprisingly still complete. I guess Gid was soft on her. "I told them that I was pregnant and you were the father, but you were fucking Thali then too, so you wanted me to abort the baby."

The fuck?

My hand stopped skimming and looked at her, what the fuck did Gid do to this girl or was it all just her?

She seemed to have been lost in her own world and continued talking. "I showed them my PT result and then the ultrasound pictures the next day." She happily narrated. "Turned out I was three months pregnant, but mom and dad didn't believe that you were the father, so I showed them a picture of us naked and in bed."