The Rules They Broke

Chapter 39: Dumb and Cheesy and Other Feelings

[Recap: When Olivia came back from the mall with her friends, she got an email from pretty boys telling her they knew where she lived. She tried running away, but while she was out, intruders fought with her brothers and knocked them out. By the time Olivia got back home with the help of Emily and her sister Hannah, her brothers were gone.]

OLIVIA 

The dining table had been shattered. There was broken glass everywhere. In the middle of the room, there was a semi-empty line of carpet where there wasn't so much glass, like something had been dragged through it, pushing the glass to the side.

Olivia found that she was suddenly wheezing.

This too shall pass.

How the hell was this supposed to pass? Even if somehow they all made it out of this in one piece, how was this ever going to pass?

Elijah was going to die.

Logan was going to die.

Blake was going to die.

And she was going to die.

She had essentially just killed them all.

Olivia gasped in some more shallow breaths.

When you have a panic attack, that impending sense of doom you have - it's just a sense. You just need to practice breathing past it.

What in the hell was Logan thinking when he said that? There was no breathing past this doom.

His exercises felt useless.

And even if you feel like the exercises are useless, you just have to keep doing them.

Olivia didn't want to keep doing them. She curled up into a ball and wrapped her arms around her shoulders and struggled to inhale and exhale.

Just do the exercises. Even if you don't feel better, they'll help you.

Yeah, right.

Okay, all you need to do is snap out of it. If you don't try really hard to do those stupid breath holding things, you can't help them.

She didn't immediately snap out of it, but after what felt like hours, she could take in a proper breath of air.

First, she crept to every single closet, cabinet, and door in the house, squeezed her eyes almost completely shut, and kicked them open with her foot, expecting at any time for someone to pop up out at her. 

Fortunately - or unfortunately - there was no one hiding in the house.

Then, she took stock of the house. She found Elijah's gun under the couch. There was a kitchen knife embedded in a kitchen cabinet. Glass was scattered from where the dining table had once stood all the way to the front door.

It had looked like her brothers had fought with everything they had.

But there was no blood.

That had to be a good thing.

Other than the complete destruction of the living room and kitchen, whoever had made her brothers disappear had ransacked the place.

They had taken Elijah's phone, his laptop, Blake's laptop, even gone through Logan's backpack. All of Blake's beloved sketches were strewn across the floor, trampled on by more than a few sets of dirty boots. Olivia carefully picked them all up and set them on his desk in a neat pile so that when he came back, he wouldn't have to see the way the intruders had completely trashed them all.