More than a Melody (H.S) ON HOLD

38

thirty eight

The name isn't me but the face on the ID card resembles mine. The hair is slightly shorter, cut off to the shoulders, and dyed midnight black. The eyes are hazel instead of deep brown and just below the collarbone, a tattoo peeks through. Only slightly, enough to see the elongated ends but not enough to fully make out a proper image.

My hands tremble as I graze through the stack, stopping immediately when I come across a white sheet with a blue patterned border. I drop everything. Harry curses. Not at me but when he sees what I see. The laws of physics are perfectly shattered, another realm outside of this one. I feel like I'm floating, gravity a spectacle of illusion that doesn't truly exist. I can't breathe.

No.
No.
No no no no no no.

"Miles, please," tears pour into my trembling hands, "please, no, no. Harry, please tell him there are other options! Please." Harry pulls me into him, but I don't feel his embrace, my skin a tightened bond of numbed elasticity- stretching and cracking and rejecting reality.

"There is no other way," Harry rustles, mourning the person I will no longer be. "There is no other way."

The document's header repeats itself in my mind, a broken record of the most dreaded lullaby.

CERTIFICATE OF DEATH

DECEASED NAME
OLIVE JANE ROE

Surely death isn't the only way out of this. Do we truly have to go to such lengths, over me? Me? I have no skill sets that could be remotely beneficial for them in the slightest. Completely illogical, all of this.

"Can't you just talk to them, Miles? Harry? Tell them how completely useless I am? W-I-I can't die.." I helplessly turn to both of them, hoping for a glimmer of reassurance that at least a fraction of what I said could potentially work. But Harry shakes his head and Miles looks away and I know I've met a dead end. Quite literally.

"You.. you know Violet? Frankie? Cora?" Harry names off the three girls who I haven't seen in so long but couldn't possibly forget. He continues before I can even make it through a full nod.

"They're dealers for the cartel, the faucons. The position they've been given is the most favorable one for women a part of the Sauvage. And that in itself is rare. Frankie's father oversees dozens of major manufacturing industries across the country, he was the only reason she was even offered that post. Violet and Cora are close friends of her, it took some convincing, but eventually they were able to follow suit."

Harry searches my face to see if I'm following along, but I appear completely and utterly lost.

"Point being," he rubs at his eyebrow, "if a distinguished businessman such as Frankie's father can only manage to lend his own daughter a position as a drug dealer, imagine what they would do to you, Jane."

I can't. I can't and don't want to imagine. The mere thought makes my insides run cold, blue, dark and hollow. All I want is to slip inside of a car and drive away, never turning back, on my own and hidden far from this world- in a bungalow on an island no one has ever seen, a shack in a mountain no one has ever explored. Anywhere but here.