Page 56 of Cursed Lifeline (Eternal Love)

Fifty Five

Esme

song: legends are made | sam tinnesz

“Alfred, I am not going to ask you again where. Am. I?”

With my eyes covered, I rely on the sounds, smells, and feelings intensifying in the air around me to try and get my bearings.

Alfred sighs, “All will be revealed in due time.”

“If this is another one of Felix’s training exercises…”

“I wish, petite. But no, training has ultimately run its course.”

Panic sets in as the deafening roar of a crowd pierces my ears. The creeping suspicion I am being set up settles at the base of my spine and starts to vibrate across my entire body, making me take a step back in fear. When I do, my back collides with a cold concrete wall. Voices trail our way and I turn my head in their direction. But with the blindfold covering my eyes, and my wrists shackled in chains, making out who it is or trying to plot an escape is out of the question.

“Help!” A man screams as several footsteps shuffle through the space, causing my breathing to increase. “Please, don’t do this. I can’t die like this. Please, I beg you.”

“What group did Viktor say?” a man asks

Viktor?

“The werewolves,” another one sneers.

Their voices grow further away, much like the shuffling of their feet, as the terrors of the man they’re carrying off continue to bounce off the cement walls around us.

“There is not enough of him left to satisfy even one of them,” the first man says.

“Not our problem,” the second insists, his voice barely tunneling in my direction from far away. “What the boss says, we do. Now grab his fractured femur, it’s poking out too far to make the next turn. Fuck, he’s bleeding out quickly. We’ll be lucky to get him there when he’s still fresh.”

He lied.

It’s the first thought that races through my mind.

Felix lied.

I’m a damn fool.

He said he was prepared to do everything he could to keep me safe this time. Feeding me to the enemy in my previous lives is not how I envisioned his promise playing out. My hands begin to shake as I accept a fate I was sworn I’d never meet again.

I try to grab for Alfred, but just as I reach out, he slips from my grasp, and the faint footsteps of an intruder grow closer.

“I was told midnight,” I hear him insist, demanding answers from a stranger I can’t see.

“Viktor thought three a.m. would be more appropriate.”

The devil’s hour.

“That has left my opponent less time to be fresh and prepared,” Alfred sighs.

Opponent?

I’m here to compete?

Against who?

“Not our problem.”

“The rules were set...,” Alfred starts to say, but he’s cut off.

“The rules are subject to change.”

“Says who?” Alfred and I yell at the same time.

I turn toward his voice but still can’t see my watcher through the blindfold.

“Says he who makes the rules.”

The devilish smirk in the man’s voice causes a fearful shiver to rush up my spine. I start to step forward angrily but Alfred’s hand jolts out in front of me and stops me.

“Where am I?” I demand.

“Has her challenger been notified?”

Challenger?

What the hell is going on here?

“He has?” the stranger smiles. “He agreed with his brother almost immediately once the suggestion was made.”

Brother?

I move quickly, attempting to dart around Alfred in a blind rage, but he anticipates and holds me back in a deathly grip.

“It’s five to three,” Alfred says, manhandling me into submission.

“You’re right. Prepare your player for the ring.”

The man walks away quickly. Deathlygrabbing hold of Alfred, he finally turns, reaches behind my head, and starts to untie my blindfold.

“If you don’t tell me what the hell is going on…” I start to insist.

“There is nothing more any of us can teach you, or give you, to help you, Esme,” his eyes fall grievously to mine and he shakes his head. “I didn’t want it to end like this.”

“Like what?” My breaths rush out in panicked waves as the crowd's noise down a concrete tunnel grows louder.

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he whispers, “ But, break my heart, for I must hold my tongue. ”

“Alfred, where is Felix? What is going on? Does he have a plan? Or am I just royally screwed like every other life I’ve been cursed to live?”

His eyes rise and sternly find mine.

“Goodbye, Esmerelda,” he frowns as another man approaches.

It’s one of Felix and Viktor’s kind who stands by snarkily, staring at us in our final moment together. Stuck in the center of a cement tunnel I’ve been held prisoner in, Alfred gives me a sad, hopeful smile.

“Goodbye?” I stammer, shaking my head. “What do you mean ‘goodbye’ Alfred?”

“They’re ready for you, slayer,” the stranger calls.

Alfred starts to walk away, but I grab him one last time in an attempt to stop him. I close my eyes and swallow over tears as emotion rises in my throat. Shaking my head, I whisper, “He promised this time would be different, Alfred, and I believed him.”

Opening my eyes, I catch my watcher’s sad stare.

“Your love with Felix has always been teetering on the edge, Esme,” with a soft smile, he starts to walk away, and I reluctantly let him go. “From the first time you saw each other, you both couldn’t help but fall into a hopeful purgatory that suspended you in empty fulfillment. Maybe what you both needed all along was to jump, not fall. Give in, and don’t hold back. Yet you’ve always been afraid to, for fear of what it might do to one another.”

“Slayer,” the man demands, but I keep my attention on Alfred’s retreating form.

“The secret lies in trusting and embracing whatever happens after the fall,” he says as he strides further down the tunnel and out of sight. He looks around him as if he’s slightly terrified and then recites a line Felix once said to me over two hundred years ago, “ Though this is madness, yet there be method in it. ”

I watch his back for a few more moments, thinking maybe he’ll look back and give me one final farewell glance. But he doesn’t, and the words he speaks haunt me from a book I read several lifetimes ago. They don’t soothe. They worry me because every main character dies at the end of Hamlet. After a moment, I slowly turn around to meet the stranger’s stare. He motions angrily over his shoulder, gesturing towards what awaits me down the tunnel.

With my head held high, I walk confidently towards a fate I’ve been running from my whole life.

Confident I know who waits for me at the center of the ring, I take a deep, calming breath.

He’s a man who long ago promised me I’d always be safe with him.

If he’s really my competition, I know that’s a promise he's finally going to keep.