Angel's Mafia (gxg) ✓

XXVI | Lost Words

I AM RUNNING.

My breath comes out in heavy gasps. The world around is me slow, liquid, and I tear through it like I'm a dull knife. Slow, I'm too slow.

Faster, Cade. Faster!

Gunshots ring out behind me, and I turn. Angel is by my side, her hazel eyes wide and glowing gold. Is she monster? Is she human? But she is suddenly laughing, and she pulls me towards her.

We both go tumbling into a sea of tall grasses, and I feel her kisses, her soft tickles. This is bliss. This is heaven.

But I roll into something hard. Something wooden.

Dread pools in my stomach, swirling, swirling, inescapable. I reach towards the rotted, splintering surface. It's a casket. Without waiting, I peer over the edge.

A woman with gleaming red ringlets laughs up at me, her mouth wide and empty and vast, full of maggots that crawl. Her heart is beating, glowing. The ruby.

I reach out . . . my fingers grasping, lingering, trying to touch the ruby . . .

But the woman, who I know must be Yvette Herald, grins at me with that wide, wide mouth and she leans forward, closer to me. And she swallows me whole.

"CADE. CADE! WAKE UP!" THERE IS A HAND, shaking my shoulder. Soft eyes blink at me, black hair falling down over my chest.

I tense, half-caught in the dream. It must have been the death of Alessandro that brought it on. I haven't had nightmares in years.

I open my mouth to say I'm alright, that I'm fine, that I'm okay, but then I look up into Angel's eyes. A beautiful amber colour. Like sunflowers that encircle her pupils. A field of waving sunflowers, bright and earnest and wistful. Like the wisps of a dream.

"It was just that it reminded me of my father," I say quietly. Angel is leaning over me, her palms on either side of my shoulder, hair falling down over her.

I've tried hard to forget this memory, but I can't. It stays buried deep inside of me, unknown, untold, and no matter what I do, I will never be free of it. Not unless I tell someone.

Angel and I, we've come a long way from the moment I woke up in her bed, late to class at university. Professor Luna and our feud seem so far away, and so do Dante and Vittoria and that time at the restaurant. Everything seems so surreal. How can this be real? How can she be real?

"When I was little," I say, "my father was always away on business. Out of country, to Europe. Somewhere in Italy, France, I don't know. But there was a time, once, when he was home. Just me and him, no Mom, no Nathan, before the drugs and the . . . everything else." I pause. Angel is still looking at me so intensely, as though she's never seen me before.

Even though I told her about Nathan, bared my heart to her, this time feels different. Sharing this with her . . . it's like giving her my heart, not just showing it to her.

"I don't know who they were, but they were these men, these people dressed in black, and they knocked on the door. My dad was upstairs, so I answered. They asked where he was. Very politely. I led them upstairs, and as soon as they saw my dad, they shot him in the head. I screamed. But they left me alone, and they left."