Page 128 of A Foster Fling

“No one lived through that…there’s no way.”

“Through what? The fire you started? The one you left me in? Todie?” Vehemence oozes in his breath with each question.

“I had to.” It tastes just as putrid on my tongue as it did the first time someone asked me about the fire.

Leaps and bounds couldn’t keep me from the flames of that day. There’s no escape. I’ve been running ever since, but to this day, the ashes follow me.

“You fucking had to? Are you serious? The only thing youhadto do, was open the fucking door.” His disappointment should carry little weight to me, but I feel it all the same.

“It was him, or us. It wasn’t about you.”

“It…wasn’t…about,me? Are you still forgetting how it all happened?Why?”

Of course I remember. Why can’t I forget it though? Why can’t I just forget how it was all my fault.

“I was scared.”

“Scared? I’d haveneverhurt you. What did you have to be afraid of? I kept you safe.”

“You made me believe he was a liar. I didn’t trust you.”

“Hewasa liar. And so are you.”

“It was her fuckingbodyWaif!” Panic, patience, something walks in and the other leaves, I just want him to shut up.

I’ve kept that me buried, and I want her to die there. I want her to rot in the hole that she dug when she killed all those people. I want her to become the cinder she was running from.

“So what? Like you weren’t doing weird shit. I remember what you and Cae got up to.”

“We weren’t hurting anyone but ourselves.”

“I didn’t hurt her or any of the others. I respected them for the beautiful things they were. No one wanted them anymore, so why couldn’t I keep them safe? What was so wrong with that?”

“They weren’t things, they were people. They were people, and they were dead, and you played with them like dolls. All of that,andI was made to believe that you had killed some of them.”

“I obsess over the things dear to me. Don’t you think, if I found joy in killing the things I care for, you would be dead? Would I not have shut you up and cherished you forever?”

This. It was the chilling things he said that had made me terrified of him. It was like the moral half of him just couldn’t always keep the twisted side of him in the dark. Most of the time he was a delicate flower, but sometimes his petals shifted and you could see the darkness dwelling in his center. The seed of true evil.

“I had no idea what you were going to do. You weren’t kept there like the rest of us. There was no way of knowing your place there anymore. They had me so twisted up. You were the perfect lure and I thought I had fallen for it.”

“If only it were the only time you had chosen their word over mine. But it wasn’t. You doubted me before that, and you were wrong then too. But no one died for that, did they?” The words are made more ominous by the removal of the mask from his face.

“I didn’t want anyone to die, just that monster.”

“But you didn’t care who else went down with him, did you? As long asyouwere left standing, as long as youwon.”

The absence of the mask and lights of the room illuminate just what my choice did to him. Scars bubble across his skin, marring the lower half of his face. His lips still look tender and painful after all this time.

“You think that was winning? I almost lost Caerus; Tildadied! All those kids are dead because ofme. Do I look like a champion to you?”

“You look like a coward who ran from the very flames she started. The requiem of regret.” He sounds more sad now. “You look tired.”

“I’m so tired, Waif. But sleep? That’s where he waits for me.” I swallow past the discomfort the truth brings me. “My head, It’s the only place he’s ever been able toreallyhurt me.”

“It’s not him that’s hurting you, Sayler, it’s been you the whole time. You’ve put it off so long you don’t even realize you’re the evil in the mirror.”

“I pushed back against the evil!”