Page 93 of Heartless Heathens

“Life isn’t fair, haven’t you noticed?” He sneered and I huffed out in annoyance.

“Yeah. I didn’t miss that bit.” I bared my teeth before dressing myself and leaving his room.

My anger would fade with my attention span. This was the routine and I was rather used to it. We woke up together, we ate our meals together and though, despite their feelings on it not being real education, I at least got to tag along once a day for lectures. Even if it was with Sonny. All eyes always glued to me so that I had to fight that sickly feeling in my stomach when their attention suffocated me. My gaze always stayed locked on Sonny’s or down on my books.

He didn’t have to ask for it that way.

I knew.

Maybe it was because of this that Father Frollo had abandoned teaching any class the men he called heathens attended. Sonny had won and the headmaster didn’t have it in him to face the wrath of his sins. Maybe I’d really just been nothing all this time, easily forgotten, easy to move on from.

Sonny said he was a coward who couldn’t face his transgressions head on, but the nuns insisted he’d been called away to oversee higher problems during those classes. This only irritated Sonny further, who insisted ‘if the bastard wasn’t even gonna show his face, why were they here?’ The idea that they would pack up and be gone one day as if they’d never been here at all made me feel some kind of hollow inside.

Like someone had taken a scoop out of my chest.

It made me angry that they could come in here and disrupt the order of everything, set it all ablaze, and just walk away and leave me with the ruins.

No. They would leave meinthe ruins.

“You okay?” Felix asked, raising an eyebrow up at me from behind the kitchen island while he cooked our breakfast.

“Hmm?” I snapped back into the present moment.

“You’re doing that really cute thing where you ball your fists really tight and scrunch your eyebrows up like you’re thinking about something that makes you mad.” He let a soft laugh out like he’d seen this expression a million times already and I gasped, my eyes darting over to Sonny just for a moment.

I was unfortunate enough to meet his gaze before looking back away. I glanced down to see both my fists resting on the marble counter, the white of my knuckles pushing through the skin tightly. He was right.

I was mad.

And somehow it made me even more angry at the thought of him having me figured out. They all did. In their own ways they’d figured out pieces of me, but none of them had the entire puzzle. Because I could only reveal parts of myself to each of them. They brought out different sides of me that I didn’t even know existed because I never had the chance to explore them on my own.

Shards of me that I’d either long forgotten, or that had been tainted and shrunk down smaller by Frollo’s undoing until I no longer recognized them as parts of myself.

“I want to talk to him,” I said quietly, hoping that only Felix would hear me.

It was a hopeful wish considering Corvin was to my right and Sonny to my left.

“No,” Sonny said, scrolling through his phone, eyes not even bothering to look away from the screen.

I didn’t have to say who. He knew.

“I need to talk to him,” I looked only to Felix, hoping that I could give him the kind of look that would soften him into letting me have my way.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea Mina.” He shook his head but his eyes darted over to Sonny.

“No,” Sonny said again, drier than the first time.

I huffed under my breath and Corvin kicked my shin without so much as turning his head my way. It was his way of telling me to suck it up and fight for what I wanted. But Sonny was relentless when it came to Frollo. We’d been doing this dance since the second week of the semester. I’d try to reason and convince him to let me go see Frollo, Felix deflected to Sonny and Sonny always shot me down.

The power balance between the three of them made no sense either. Neither of the Ecuras bothered to make too many decisions if Sonny was around. Whether that was out of choice, habit, or something else I couldn’t discern.

“Why does Sonny get to decide everything?” I asked, conjuring up every ounce of courage I had stored in my veins from being a coward for so long.

He didn’t like that.

“I get to decide everything because I’m the one who always ends up cleaning up the messes. I get to decide because I’m the one who keeps you safe. You want to throw that all away for him to fill your mind with more lies? Go. But don’t come back here if you do.” He said it like he didn’t care either way, pushing the stool with a scratching sound against the floors.

He stood, grabbing his plate and taking it to the sink before walking out of the kitchen, not sparing a second glance at me.