Page 225 of The Grand Duel
Lissie fell asleep in my arms tonight, right after breaking her heart to me.
Breaking my heart.
I’ve felt rage, anger, pain like this only one other time in my life. The night I lost my little sister.
“Aldridge?” Mason’s groggy voice comes through the phone. “Fuck, what time is it? What’s going on?”
I swallow and continue to stare at the house before me, uncertain if I have it in me to even speak.
“Charles,” he snaps, as if waking up fully. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”
“I get why you stopped me now,” I say, not recognising my own voice.
“Why I stopped you?” he repeats. “Where are you, mate? Where’s Lissie?”
I hear clothes rustling and open my car door, stepping out. “I don’t think I would have stopped that night. I would have killed Marcus if you’d let me leave campus. But you stopped me.” I open my boot and pull the baseball bat from inside, blinking away the blur in my eyes. “Are you busy tonight, Mase?”
“Tell me where you are.”
My heart hammers in my chest, the thought of my Lis?—
“Charles?”
I hang up and walk towards the house with nothing but a haze of Lissie crying on the living room floor clouding my vision. The sound of her cries and the words that left her mouth playing over and over in my mind like a broken, soulless record.
My foot goes through the back door of Elton House on my fifth attempt, the timeworn wood splintering up my shin.
Screams filter in through the memory of Lissie’s cries as I walk into the home, terror etched in raised voices I don’t care to make out.
“I always dreamed of having children when I was a little girl, but then I had to not want them. I had to just stop. To turn that off somehow.”
I swing the bat across the sideboard, smashing everything sitting atop it.
Chaos ensues.
“And when Jovie found out she was pregnant, I had to pretend that it was okay. That I was okay and that I didn’t want children, so it was fine. But then when they told her she had to get rid of the baby, of Will…I took her and I ran, and I’ve not stopped running ever since.”
I hit the drywall over and over, sending picture frames tumbling to the ground.
Glass flares into the air, covering me.
“Stop! Please, no. Stop!”
“It’s why she won’t come home. I know it. Jovie doesn’t want to hurt me with Willow—something I can’t have, but I never asked for that.”
I enter rooms, taking out anything and everything I can that will break apart or crumble.
“No one ever asked me what I wanted.”
“Of course Lissie sent him, Grace, look at him. It’s the man she was with that day.”
I turn on them, my chest heaving, eyes wild, ears ringing.
William Elton stands in his robe, fucking terrified. He holds up his shaking hand to me. “This stops now. You’ve made your point, now leave.”
I walk to him and grab him by the collar of his dressing gown, throwing him to the ground.
I could kill him.