Cassius
Anya lay fast asleep with her head resting on my chest. Locks of her soft hair spilling like still water over me.
It felt like a drug when she touched me. Being in her presence was enough to calm me.
As she rested, I allowed my thoughts to carry me back to the carnage of the hours before.
To the room where it all started for us. Had I purged the darkness living inside of me? If anyone could help me, it would be Anya.
Her eyelids blinked open.
“I’m sorry.” I said the words that I’d been dying to tell her as she slept.
She stretched languidly. “You already apologized.”
“I know.” I let out a regretful sigh. “It doesn’t excuse what happened.”
“You were angry. You were hurt. ”
I pulled her in and pressed my lips to her forehead. “I was, but that wasn’t you. I wasn’t angry with you. You can’t condemn the daughter for sins of the father.”
“But isn’t that why you brought me here?”
“I do feel like I saved you from him. Even if that wasn’t my intention.” Because my intention was catastrophic. Living with this would never be easy. “You.” I looked into her eyes. “You’ve changed me.”
She stared up like she wanted to believe me but wasn’t sure.
“You asked me to tell you, so I will. I want to show you . . . me.” I eased myself from beneath her and swung my legs off the bed and got up. Getting dressed, I gestured for her to do the same.
Then I took her small hand in mine. “Do you trust me?”
“I do.”
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“We have to go back.”
Her eyes widened in concern as she interpreted my meaning. After a few seconds, she agreed with a nod.
Together, hand in hand, I walked us back to the place where it all ended for me. Where my life as a young man changed irrevocably. Where I became the man I was now.
Together, we went back to the chapel.
We walked along the well-worn pathway to the place that had once brought joy but had morphed into a prison for my soul, where it was destined to be trapped forever—before her.
Before this beautiful woman came into my life. Agreeably, I had brought her here, but she wanted to stay, which felt like an unseen miracle.
Anya, this young woman who carefully stepped over the threshold with me to the most haunted location on the property, one where the ghosts continued to savage me day in and day out, cleaving to my being as though I was the only vessel for their revenge.
The place was desolate and, at the same time, filled with chaos. Debris was strewn across the aisle, with not one patch free of disarray, paying tribute to all the sins cast amongst the crumbling walls.
I leaned back against one of the pews. The only one not touched by a sledgehammer. By my hand, no less.
Folding my arms across my chest, I said, “You were going to try to clean this place up?”
She nodded. “Seems silly now.”
“No, it was more than I could ever have asked for. More than I deserve.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry to bring you back in here but I think it’s the right place to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Tell you what really happened that day.”
Whispers of memories scurried out of the shadows.
She nodded, encouraging me to go on and turning to look for a place to sit on a half-destroyed pew. She gave a shy glance my way as though knowing she was drawing attention to what I’d done to the seat all those years ago. There was enough there for her to get comfortable.
“You’re the best thing to ever happen to this place,” I whispered.
“Oh, Cassius, we can rebuild. If it’s something you want to do.” Unsure if I’d ever be capable of that, I drew in a deep, cleansing breath. “This was the chapel of the estate. Passed down from generation to generation. A part of our family history.” I smirked. “A good old Catholic, Italian family. During the plague of the 1920s, when it was unsafe to attend church, my ancestors built this so they could pray safely.” I drew in a sharp breath. “It meant so much to my mom.”
Anya fixed her attention on me, never wavering.
“Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to run the business. I wasn’t supposed to be involved. I never wanted that for myself. I wanted to give myself to something different.”
“Like what?”
“I loved music, but I loved science, too. Mom used to joke I’d make a great doctor because I was always fascinated by science. I never got a choice.”
She looked around as though trying to tie all the pieces together. “Why do you hate this place?” A tremor in her tone.
Those same old emotions coming at me like a freight train—
Throwing me into the fray, as though I’m back there again. Looking beyond the pews, seeing a blurry image—me, as though having an out-of-body experience and witnessing it all over again. My former, younger self was standing at the altar.
“My father.”
I moved away from Anya and started to pace. “As you know, I found my mother laying where we left her. She’d been dead for hours. I picked her up and carried her in here and lay her over there, near that pew. That’s when I saw him.” I gestured to where my father’s body had been discovered. “Dad had been shot in the head. All that time that I had been hiding in the maze like a pussy, my father was alive.”
“Cassius, you were fourteen.”
“I don’t give a fuck. I could have saved him. I should saved him. Instead, he was brought in here and killed. He died alone.”
Anya’s eyes were filled with sorrow. “I’m so sorry.”
“Then I went back for my sister and brought Sofia to sit with me in here to wait for the police.”
“Why didn’t they arrest Stephen?”
“There weren’t any witnesses left alive to testify to seeing him here. Only Sofia, and she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t testify it was him. As I’d been hiding in the maze and merely heard gunshots, I was an unreliable witness. Even after telling the detectives what had transpired out on the swamp only hours before.”
“Why didn’t they believe you?”
“Stephen had witnesses who put him at another part of the city.”
“They lied for him?”
“Most people would. If they wanted to live.”
“After everyone had gone. After the police, the medics whose only job was to take the bodies away, I came back here.”
“Where was Sofia?”
“Hospital.”
“You were alone here?”
“I refused to leave.”
“What about your friend Ridley?”
“His father kept him away. The only reason his dad survived was he left minutes before Stephen and his men got here. He’d stopped me from seeing my dad. From warning him.”
“He passed on that guilt to Ridley?”
“After Ridley graduated law school, he came to work for me. I assumed he felt obligated to do what he could to protect me after his father had inadvertently gotten mine killed. Though I’ve told Ridley I’m not sure anyone could have stopped Glassman.”