Page 53 of Diamond Desire

Grief and guilt were a constant presence and had I not already experienced it so roughly, I would have been just like Mish or Linc with their rage and constant sudden withdrawals from everything around them. Or perhaps my girl – who so far had done nothing since her return home but have sleepless nights spent screaming into her pillows and days spent like a zombie, barely able to do more than the basics not to die as she sat with her trauma and pain, unable to do more than share a snippet of it with us.

Like how she got out. What she did to Elaina.

She was wreaked with guilt and pain, but she shouldn’t have been, not when it was our fault. We were the guilty ones; all of us. Not that she knew I felt guilty, but it was obvious to me that was what we all suffered with.

I hadn’t found her. Neither had anyone else. We’d been chasing ghosts and false leads and spending hours upon hours trying to find her and getting nowhere. It was our job to protect our girl and keep her safe and we had failed time and time again despite the fact she had been barely any miles down the damn road.

Sapphire had pulled her crown up high and rescued herself – she’d defeated the villain and saved herself from her locked tower. She’d returned herself to us, even if it hurt.

Ithadhurt. One look at her would have told you that.

Cassie O’Malley – the name of the stalker, that had been revealed to us at last – had done her best to cover her tracks even when holding our girl hostage. Sapphire had been dosed up on PCP most days, and sometimes she’d been given ketamine to knock her out or almost do it. Honestly, we were all a little shocked she hadn’t overdosed, even if she had come close. But we were lucky that Cassie had seemed to know what she was doing when it came to giving just enough of a dosage for it to make Sapphire see things and be entirely full of delusions.

I wasn’t shocked she’d been unwell. I wasn’t shocked she’d almost died.

Sapphire had left the hospital and come home, but she hadn’t been herself. Each day that passed she was worse – talking to herself, fighting to escape as though she was back wherever she had been. She hadn’t even been able to tell us more than a few basic facts the first time she’d woken up and each time someone made a noise or did something entirely normal like breathe, my girl would flinch and panic.

She hadn’t been eating right, nor had she been taking care of herself, even when we tried to help. It didn’t matter how many baths we ran or times we offered to shower with her the first few days; she hadn’t seemed interested in it. Then Ruby had taken over, and something changed.

At first, even though we were grateful, we didn’t understand – why her but not us? But the more we watched them, the easier it was to work out the single thing that differentiated all of us and Ruby.

Ruby had been through the same thing.

She’d been locked up, drugged and hurt. She’d been made to question her own sanity and left to rot in a dungeon she never thought she would escape from.

Sapphire didn’t like the shower. She was screaming and panicked each time she was near it. The same went for the dark. And though I wished one of us could have been a source of comfort for her in those dark moments where she forgot where she was and that she was free, I didn’t care who she leaned on so long as it helped. And Ruby helped – Ruby understood what it was like to hate the world. The dark. The water in your lungs until you couldn’t breathe anymore. She knew what it was like to be kept prisoner both physically and mentally and though I wished she had never experienced such things I was grateful that she knew how to help – grateful she had been able to get my girl through the worst of her delusions and fears until Sapphire was able to handle to shower without fear and with one of us by her side. Or that she could now sleep with only a single lamp on, rather than every light near her.

For almost a month, we kept trying with her, refusing to give up and leave her to her own devices. We got closer, talked more, pushed her to accept that she wasn’t trapped anymore. Nor were we weren’t figments of her imagination or torture. Weweren’t just lying or ghosts or whatever the hell else she thought we were.

All of us were real, and we were here. She was safe.

Eventually it worked. Bit by bit, step by step. At first, it was just her letting us sit in her room when she had her nightmares, holding onto her as she screamed and cried. Then she started to believe us when we talked; she truly understood that we weren’t nightmares or dreams without needing a minute or two to trust it. By the end of the second week of her return, she’d woken up screaming from yet another nightmare and had eagerly let me hold her as she sobbed onto my shoulder, and recounted the tiniest bit of her torture – of how she had been waterboarded over and over again, almost daily for a while, and how each time the pain itself had not only hurt her but the memories of her mother’s death had come back too.

Even when I didn’t know the details of what else had happened to her, it was easy to guess with the medical report Beau got from the hospital. Sapphire had been starved, dehydrated and damn near overdosed almost every day. The drugs alone were enough to cause her hallucinations, but when left on her own for weeks in a single room, that definitely hadn’t helped.

None of her bones had been broken, nor had she been assaulted with anything more heinous like John O’Malley would have done. But she’d still been beaten, had a handful of fresh scars from all the glass that had been pulled out of her body. And she’d fractured the knuckles on both her hands from – we guessed, seeing as they were in a state – punching things. She even had a gash along the hairline on her forehead that had required stitches and on the rare occasion she had spoken about things to us about her nightmares, she explained how she had used her fucking head like a battering ram against the mirror that had let her out.

She’d been that desperate to escape she’d hurt herself over and over just for the chance to get out, and that thought alone was enough to make me hate myself a little more for not saving her.

The rest of us were… well, we were doing whatever we could to distract ourselves as we waited for Sapphire to heal. And sure, over the last few days she had seemed more like herself. She’d even been hanging out with the girls more too – the Persephone girls and Henley especially. The lot of them bonding further over their joint torment like a club that nobody wanted to be a part of. Even Rika, who had gone back to Diamond Grove to sort out her college things and stay out of the way of some of the danger, had come back once or twice for a weekend or two spent doing nothing but trying to make the entire house forget just how messed up most of us were.

It had worked on all of us a little, and Sapphire was now the last one standing who wasn’t quite one hundred percent faking being okay. But none of us would rush her. If she needed years to feel right again – to feel strong enough to continue with the plans we knew she still wanted to achieve, then we would wait. We would let her spend eternity healing before we ever let her push herself into more agony again.

Right now I was doing what I did when stressed and working on what remained of Linc’s car. I was still doing my best to attempt to restore it purely out of spite. It ought to have been a write off, but I didn’t care. John O’Malley could die before I gave up on fixing things. He could fuck himself if he thought I would let Linc lose another thing he cared about, even if a car was in no way the same as his dad.

But I could fix a car. I couldn’t bring back the dead.

There was a rustling of feet on the gravel driveway beside me and I rolled out from under the car, smelling the tea before I saw it in a perfectly manicured hand, hovering just above me.My stomach instantly fluttered and my late morning plans of car work instantly vanished, replaced with something far better.

“Those nails are pretty; that rainbow shade is nice on you.” I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at the best sight in the world.

“Everything is cute on me,mi sol.” My girl replied, her grin wide even if her big blue eyes were lined with sadness.

Her hair, freshly dyed silver and bright enough to blind, added to her sharpness as it sat bluntly just by her chin. Maybe the hair appointment last week had helped change something inside her, or all the other parts of her life and the support she had was finally working. But I didn’t care. All I knew is that Sapphire had woken up one day with a renewed determination, and had forced us to leave her with Raya’s stylist after making hasty nighttime plans that had made her feel better.

Sapphire had passed out in a kitchen chair exhausted with trying her best, but refused to quit. Not until her hair was no longer black and long.

Not until she didn’t look like her mother, she said.