Captivated by shadows [h.s.]

19.

Rosalie Gray

I exhaled through my nose, and the smoke from the cigarette I was still holding rose into the air.

Harry and I sat next to each other in silence, on the floor of a bedroom, drinking whiskey while I smoked the very first cigarette I ever got from him.

The bad flashbacks still haunted me, but it wasn't quite as bad as it had been a few hours ago. Maybe because they kept repeating themselves over and over again, if you played a film over and over again from the beginning, it would also get boring after a while.

Perhaps the whiskey is simply starting to take effect.

Harry told me that alcohol often helped him to forget, maybe that's the case with me right now.

"Can I ask you something?" I interrupted the silence and looked at him again.

"I don't care," he shrugs his shoulders indifferently without looking at me.

"Who did this to you?" I didn't know where I had suddenly found the courage to ask him something so personal. Maybe it was the alcohol, or the things I'd already experienced.

The last few days I never had the courage to approach Harry and talk to him like I did with Niall. I guess I was just afraid he'd shout at me, or maybe kill me like he'd threatened to do several times, but what could happen?

What was Harry supposed to do apart from kill me?

I'm at a point right now where I don't care if I live or die. As I said before, my life is a pile of rubbish at the moment, if I were to die then at least I could find peace.

"What do you mean?"

"Who beat you up like that? I mean, you look awful." I look at the many small cuts that have been emblazoned on his face for a few days.

"You don't look much better at the moment." He replies with a grin, which makes me laugh.

"Touché," I turned my gaze away from him and took another drag on my cigarette. "Does this have anything to do with Eduardo?" I asked another question.

I didn't care if I was too pushy or not. I told myself that if I made it out of this hell, I'd confront the boys with all these things and I started now.

"I can't talk to you about such things." He closes his eyes with a sigh.

"And why is that?" I ask further.

"Because it's none of your business."

"If it was none of my business, we wouldn't be sitting here right now. Why don't you finally realise that you can no longer hide all these things from me?"

"We can and we will. You'll only learn what you need to know, you don't need to be interested in anything else."

"But I'm interested, Harry." my head snaps back to him. "I care because I want to know what the bloody reason was that I was kidnapped and tortured again." My heart started beating faster because it made me angry that after all this he still thinks he doesn't have to tell me anything. "Like you said, you have no idea what happened in there, what they did to me and the things they said. I have a right to know why I had to go through hell again and why my fucking life has to be like this now." I got louder. It almost seemed as if all my grief and all the traumatic experiences I had been through were transformed into a single emotion.

Anger

He didn't say anything back, just stared at me and let me shout at him. Maybe it was the alcohol that got me so worked up, but I deserve to know what's going on.