Page 20 of Diamond Desire
“Dad’s dead and I can’t lose you too – don’t make me lose you too.” Someone else I knew better than I knew myself cried and held my hand. “I can’t keep going without all of you – I’ve been barely holding myself together for years. I won’t cope without you.”
Over and over again the dark claimed me. It picked and pulled me to pieces, chewing me up and the spitting me out without a care. It kept coming without mercy, shooting pain and death and despair through every atom of my being.
Until it didn’t. Until a single sentence dragged me out of the depths of wherever the hell I was and forced me back into the light.
A single sentence spoken with such disdain and love rolled into one that there was no mistaking who was saying it because nobody else had ever spoken to me the way she did.
“You’re such a lazy prick, Koko.”A soft voice scoffed from beside me as the world began to turn more gray than anything else.
I groaned and writhed, trying to force the last of the darkness away from me so I could see what was happening and just what hell was like. I presumed I was in hell, anyway. It was kind of warm and my entire body seemed to burn.
“You think you can pretend to die? That is such a loser move.”The voice said again, adding to the odd beeping noises echoing in my ears, and the strangest scent of cleaning products that burned my nose a little.
My body wriggled again, eyes too heavy to open properly. I wanted to lift my lids and see what was happening, but for some reason it was taking a lot more effort than it should. My eyes were like sandpaper and the second I managed the tiniest little burst of energy to crack open my lids, the world was filled with enough light to scald me.
“If you don’t wake up right now, I’m going to kill you really violently. Uncle Dorjan taught me how to fight and he said I’m allowed to hit boys who piss me off and you are pissing me off.”The girl spoke again, this time with more anger in her tone. And though I was mildly sure I was dead or hallucinating, I couldn’t stop myself from getting excited and not just because she’d said my dad’s name.
Hand reaching blindly around me, I found a tube sticking in my nose. It was plastic and cold, and I instantly tried to pull it away from me, only to be stopped by the soft touch of a hand much smaller than my own.
For an instant, relief scoured through me.
Sapphire. It had to be sapphire. She was with me, and she was fine. It didn’t matter that the voice wasn’t hers; the perfume wasn’t the type she wore, or that she had never once called me Koko nor had she even known it was something that I answered to sometimes.
It didn’t matter that Sapphire barely knew a handful of words in Hungarian, or that she was only beginning her journey to learn it, and that the person who spoke to me now was entirely fluent.
I just wanted my girl. I wanted to hold her and see her and promise her that I wouldn’t leave her, nor would I let her be taken again.
With far too much force, my eyes fluttered open, head spinning, and though I was fairly sure I was as high as a damn kite, I was perfectly able to see who was there. And though the tiniest shiver of disappointment burned in my veins, I couldn’t be too sad, even if it wasn’t my girlfriend.
It might not have been the woman I loved and would marry one day, but it was still another woman I loved. One I had loved since I’d held her in my arms and vowed that I would keep her safe until she was big enough to look out for herself.
I gasped in a lungful of air that spluttered into a cough the moment I realized who was opposite me.“What the hell?”It was natural for my brain to switch back to Hungarian, knowing the ghost who haunted me spoke it better than English.
I hadn’t imagined it. I was hearing Hungarian. I had been listening to it in the darkness – it wasn’t a dream.
The world came into focus, and I instantly recognized one of the many rooms in Sapphire’s mansion that had been turned into a makeshift hospital of some kind. And though I felt like I had been run over by a truck – repeatedly – I was able to register that I wasn’t dead and nor was I alone.
A girl with big brown eyes that were just like mine, her skin a little darker thanks to her mixed-race father, stood about a foot away from me. Her dark brown hair had been dyed into a hideous shade of light pink, and she wore far too little clothing for my liking; a matching pleated skirt and cropped top made of a shiny sequined fabric that burned my eyes and showed off a little too much flesh I would beat a man for looking at.
She also had streaks of mascara down her cheeks, tears burning in her eyes, and a scowl deep enough to make me shiver even though she was seven years younger than me and had the arm strength of a toddler when she hit me.
“What the fuck, Rika? How are you here?”I coughed again, the words too much for my dry throat.
“I decided to move early for college, and spend some weeks in your city seeing pretty sights. But when I landed in the airport instead of getting a taxi, your friends called me,”my little cousin Dorika, hovered by the edge of the bed, her eyes narrowed,“and said you were maybe dying, and they sent a car to get me so you would have a nice face to wake up to. Turned out you were just faking it all along and I didn’t need to rush – you’ve been napping for days like a baby.”
Considering she had been crying, and was never the sort to shed tears, I was fairly sure it had been a close call to me dying.
Turned out the darkness had been more than just a dream.
I had almost been lost to it.
“Faking it? You think I am that good at acting?”My voice was croaky, and I had the urge to cough again as I did my best to pull myself up so I could sit instead of lying down on the far too many hospital blankets that were making me sweat.
“No.”She smirked and shrugged with the arrogance only she could pull off.“But maybe you took lessons with all your rich friends and now you have actual skills instead of being a loser.”
“Wait.”My brain took a moment to come back to reality and comprehend what she had said as she handed me a bottle of water from the side table, lid unscrewed.“My friends? Which friends?”
“The hot blonde one with the tattoos. I think he said his name was Lincoln, but honestly, I wasn’t listening to a word he said. I just enjoyed watching the way his pretty mouth moved.”She fanned herself with a dark purple cushion from the bed before she hit me with it in the arm and cursed me out for nearly dying and abandoning her.