I do not answer. Because I do not have to. River already knows.
“Ray lied to you. He told you he believed you. But they chose you specifically, Jav. They turned you into a killer because they believed you were predisposed already. He tarred you with that brush, and he didn’t care if it was true or not. He made you what you are. He destroyed you.”
I close my eyes, and Bella seems so far away.
The rage is frothing inside of me, and River won’t stop.
“They printed it right in your file, Jav. Those vile words about your mother. Have you forgotten so easily?”
The flashbacks wrench me back in time, swallowing me whole.
“Enough,” I say.
But River does not listen. He speaks of my training with a level of detail that nobody else can. Because he is the only one who knows of my confessions. He speaks of the torture. The waterboarding. The burns. The mind games. The deceptions and punishments that followed.
He speaks of the blood I spilled. Repeatedly. The tests. And I tell him to stop, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t stop until I have smashed the phone against the wall and red is the only thing that I see.
Hatred. Rage. Hell.
The door crashes against the wall from the force of my adrenaline. The vein in my neck throbs and my footsteps ricochet down the hall as I stalk towards the kitchen.
She will be gone. She needs to be gone.
I wait for the cool air. The air that will inevitably linger from the window where she has escaped. The breeze that will carry her scent as she runs fast and far away from this place. From me.
I expect quiet. The peace that I desire so badly. But I do not find those things. Instead, I find my Bella, still at the kitchen stove, her eyes wide as she watches me come down the hall.
“Javi?” she whispers.
“Why are you still here?” I roar.
She backs into the counter and hugs herself, shaking her head frantically, but no words leave her mouth.
“You should have left when you had the chance!” I sneer.
I chase her around the counter and grab her arm, and she pleads with me as I drag her from the room.
“Javi, please. No, please. Whatever just happened, don’t do this. I’m begging you.”
Her words fall on deaf ears.I block out everything around me and focus on the red. The pain. The revenge.
I am no longer weak. Nothing can break me. Not even this girl and her trickery. This is what I tell myself. This is what I believe. Until she speaks again.
“Javi,” she whispers. “Javi. I love you. Please. I love you.”
I freeze. And I stare at her. This girl with the pale blue eyes, more venomous than even her father as she spills such lies from her lips.
I tell her so, and she tries to deny it.
“It’s true,” she says.
Tears track down her cheeks. And this time they do not make me weak. They do not make me want to fuck her either. They fill me with wrath all over again.
“You are a liar and a fool,” I tell her.
“I am not a liar,” she cries. “I may be many things, Javi. But a liar is not one of them. I will prove it to you. I’ll do anything. Anything. Just tell me.”
This time, I smile. And I feel like my old self again.