Worlds Between Us

Chapter 26.

I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.

My whole body is trembling, my face is soaked with tears, and my hands are clenched so tightly around the little box I know it's cutting into my fingers.

There they are.

My family photo is still laying right on top of the box where I left it when Macie and I went out to look for food that last night. The night she was taken. The night I was stabbed.

My mom, my dad, my little brother, and even me.

Child me, tiny and rounder in the cheeks with my hair combed back into a tight bun at the back of my head. I don't even look like me in this picture. I was so young. So naive to what my life would become. Blissfully unaware with my missing front tooth that soon the people around me who I loved so much were going to die. That we would become this.

This photo was what got me through the cold nights. It was this picture that kept my family fresh in my mind. I'd look at this picture every single day after they were gone. The more their voices and mannerisms started to fade, the more I stared at this picture, unwilling to let their faces fade out of my memory like the rest of them.

But then...

I remember how hard I worked, still injured, to get back to mine and Macie's camp to look for this very box. This box that holds all that was left of my family. I remember the way my heart shattered into a million pieces when I realized it was gone forever. That my most valuable thing was stolen away, taken by someone who would never know the significance of this photo or the love I held for the people in it.

I had assumed it had been scavengers that took my things, but I'd been wrong.

Oh how very very wrong I had been.

It wasn't scavengers.

It's so so so much worse than that.

Strangers didn't steal from me.

It was him.

Demetri.

The man who moments ago I happily had his tongue in my mouth, he was the one who did this all. I thought I had feelings for him. I thought I knew him. I thought he was a person worth trusting and believing in and fighting for when all along...all along he was this.

The fucked up thing is, he doesn't even know.

He doesn't even know that this is my family.

I'm unrecognizable from the little girl in this picture, smiling with scrunched eyes at the camera. He has no clue how he's really wronged  me and that just makes it all that much more of an impossible realization to swallow.

It wasn't just any old scavengers. It was them. It was the guards. Not just nameless strangers who may be lurking around here. It was Demetri and his pack of followers who stole my life away from me.

I feel sick to my stomach as an even worse realization slams into me.

Was he the one who stabbed me?

There is no getting past that. No ignoring it now that the thought is in my head. Was it Demetri's curved blade that plunged into my stomach that night? His hate and disgust that wanted nothing more than to let my life leak out of me slowly back into the earth below? Was Demetri the one who took Macie away and gave her to that monster?

It's too much.

It's all too much.

Bile rises in my throat but I choke it back, swallowing hard against the acidic truths.
I look back at the chest where it still sits on the ground of this hut so unassuming, so innocent, so devoid of any signs of what it truly holds.