Page 80 of The Truths We Burn

I charge him, wrapping my arms around his waist and burrowing my shoulder into his gut. A rush of air comes from his mouth as I piledrive him into the ground and send our bodies into the icy snow.

The cold bites into my naked skin as Alistair uses his weight to roll us. The healing cuts on my back sting with pain as he presses me into the ground. Our breaths are visible as we tumble with one another.

But he’s yet to lay a single punch on me, which only makes things worse. I want him to hurt me. I need it right now.

“Rook,” he grunts, but I just keep going, shoving at his body, my fist throwing the first solid punch into the side of his ribs.

I had failed my mother, and now I’m failing Rosie. I’m failing Silas.

Why can’t I just help the ones I care about? Why can’t I keep them?

Every day, Silas slips further and further away, and all I can do is watch. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him to take his meds, he still drifts from me, and it’s fucking killing me.

They’re all…

Leaving me.

“Rook!” This time it’s louder, and using both his hands, he grabs a hold of my shoulders and picks me up off the snow before slamming me back down. My body jolts, bones rattling inside of me and my head bouncing off the hard ground.

“Ah,” I cough as I feel my cuts start to break open, trickles of blood and melted snow sliding down my back. Those slices were made only a few days ago, and it’ll only take them longer to heal now.

One large hand latches onto the back of my neck and tugs me forward. My head rams into his chest, and he holds me there. My body is rigid and tense. I fight against his hold, but he just tightens his grip.

“Goddammit!” I growl.

Before coming to the Peak, I’d stopped by the gas station to grab lighter fluid, and that monstrous asshole Frank Donahue had the balls to speak to me in line. Asking if college was going well, having the nerve to mutter Silas’s name in regard to how he’s doing.

All I could imagine was ripping his tongue straight from his mouth for even thinking of Silas or Rose. I’d never practiced self-control like that before, and it had been almost impossible to walk away without blowing up that gas station with him inside of it.

It had been the cherry on the shit cake.

I can’t take this anymore.

I can’t wait any longer.

“I get it. I know what you’re feeling,” he mutters. “I miss her too. I know it doesn’t seem like we’re doing anything and we’re just letting that piece of shit walk around carefree, but we will have our time. His time will come, I promise you, Rook.”

In the years I’d known Alistair, he’d never once broken a promise to me. Ever.

Even when I came to him and asked him to go hard on me in the ring when we were sparring. The first few times on the mats, I could tell he was taking it easy on me, and I didn’t want that.

I didn’t need that.

And he’d been the first one to notice that. The one who knew what I needed was pain and punishment in order to make it through the days.Especially now, it doesn’t matter how many punches I take, there’s no stopping the constant guilt that floods my system every moment I’m alive and she isn’t.

Alistair always seems to know what everyone needs.

But what he doesn’t know is on top of all this, someone who should have stayed fucking dead and buried has just been resurrected—walked straight into my Latin class with her strawberry hair and cinnamon-dusted freckles, looking ten pounds lighter and twenty times deadlier.

She has nothing here, so the question is why the fuck did she come back? I knew she’d been committed to Monarch Mental Health Institution—not that I cared, it’s just what had made it through the grapevine. But if she’d been let out, why the hell did she come back here?

Isn’t she supposed to be in LA by now?

Why the fuck couldn’t she just stay gone?

“Do you two ever get along?” Thatcher interjects.

I place my hands on his chest, pressing into him, and he slips off my body. He extends his arm to me, and I take it, allowing him to help me up. We test each other often, more than the other guys.