The Devil's Touch | Kylo Ren

TWENTY-FOUR

Six Months Later

Swimming amiss the swirling embers in the fiery ashes of Eve's broken mind, lives the dying memory of a man.

While death is a tragedy in the young and a right of passage for the old, the wicked wanders in between. Some people mourn with the good of memory—although she has none.

If memories of good and bad were replaced with photographs, Eve would be left with only an envelope of developed black and white, compared to many of albums. She owns very few; most of black walls and cell bars. Some faces remain. Empty ones belonging to patients, stern of those who beat them. One of evil, one of perpetual good.

Belonging to one of those which mentioned—He sits not to far off in the corner of the dark and harrowing food-hall, his face shadowed by the monsters cowering in his soul, but familiar non-the-less among the endless heads of patients in which she never quite paid attention to—because there was something about him that gripped her in like a magnet compared to the rest.

It's a wet feeling of deja-vu slipping and slopping through her fingers and palms. His name a distant but forgotten taste upon her tongue; his resemblance to something lurking much further back in her head that she cannot quite bring to the forefront.

Sitting lonesome on her table, a meal of slop with a topping and sprinkling of prayer and saving grace is left untouched and cold. Eve winces and removes her stare from upon the strange not-so-stranger when he turns from the window and looks right through her.

He had spoken to her once before—shouted; right in her face. Bang! Bang! She sucks a quick breath in at the sound of the gunshot ricocheting up her fragile spine and right into the place it remains in her memory—and in the preacher's dead head of ginger.

He had killed the man in a quick craze. She tries to swallow the burning sensation in her throat down but it remains. It should frighten her—the deadliest patient—but everyday after the murder Eve grew only curiouser and crazier about him.

It didn't surprise her, she was insane after-all. How else had she landed herself in such a treacherous place?

She lifts her eyes of sorrow and curiosity back to him—he still stared back at her with something of distant distaste living so effortlessly in his pools of calamitous black. 

Bang!

Brown turned into blue.

Bang! Bang!

The preachers cracked skull hits the ground and his wide and expired eyes stare up to the sky where his Lord awaited him.

BANG!

Eve's heart swells as flashes of a man who often haunted her dreams and turned them into nightmares, flick like a kaleidoscope of cursed echos behind her glazed stare. She scratches at her skin and attempts to peel the urgent and clingy fingers off her and she bites her tongue to replace the taste of his with metallic.

She can still feel him living inside of her; shattering and prodding in her tight core with assault. Beads of sweat run down her temples, just as they had down the man's forehead, cascading down his nose and upon her quivering lip. 

She doesn't remember the day she was born—nobody does. But Eve's first memory might as well have been the day she was conceived to the brutality of life between the eternity of Heaven or Hell. The day she awakened only to be pulled beneath the weight of a barbaric man who had shown her a place and her role as a woman.

Blue eyes turn back to brown.

The patient still stared as she had lost herself to her mind once more before returning to reality.

A horrific feeling of revelation clung onto Eve's heart tighter than those trembling and erotic hands once were. It was as if the evocation had a vicelike grip on her blood and the gravity had suddenly distorted and slowed to a dreadful pace around her and him: the not-stranger.

The callouses on her hands crack and splinter the more she picks at them with nerve. Just like every other morning-tea before this one, the moment their eyes lock and hers flick away, a loud crack of his metal tray and the scrape of his chair on floorboards and chains make a loud sound from the quiet hall of crazy murmurs.

Behind fallen dark brown hair, the pale man asks the guard to leave the hall. With a scoff and a rude rolling of eyes, the guard does as the patient wishes and takes him back to his cold and empty cell; where the devil waits and warms his bed for his return to sanctuary.

"Please leave me alone," Eve had whispered once before to the patient, but as she follows the way his strong shoulders tighten and his big hands grip the chain that connects to the cuffs that pinch the skin of his wrists to a deadly red, she can't help but want him to stay—for he was the most interesting effigy in White-Ivy Manor.

The devil's in the details that would remain unspoken with honour. Eve no longer stared at the marble saviours that perched around the halls and loomed within the pious portraits, for her emancipator resided behind bars of sin. This is her burden that lingers in the maze of her dark heart, and a secret that she will keep hidden like gold until the time comes for her to confess it to her Lord in the sky—although to live in a place such as this, Eve doesn't think she is worthy of the life of prosperity in the eye of the Almighty.

Perhaps, the only place she truly will ever be able to thank the mysterious stranger who killed the blue-eyed preacher who had stolen her first memory, would be when they join in Hell.