Free Deadly by Ker Dukey Page A

by Melody, walk in. She gasps when she sees me and then her eyes narrow. She runs to the knife block. Luckily for me she’s predictable and I emptied the block when she left. She searches and then turns on me. “I don’t need a weapon Ryan, I will beat you to death using these two hands.” She rushes at me but Blake swoops her off her feet. She lunges over his shoulder. “I hate you, I hate you!” she screams. It’s nice to see her fire.
    “I’m not here for you,” I reiterate.
    “Fuck you… Fuck you, you piece of shit. I hate you!” she screams. The ‘fuck’ word sounds good from her.
    “Calm down, baby,” Blake soothes and if I wasn’t bleeding to death and desperate to get to Cereus I’d laugh.
    “Oh don’t you tell me to calm down.” She wriggles from his hold and pushes past him until she’s standing in front of me, her finger right in my face as she stabs it at me to make her point. “You’re a black hole Ryan and everything near you gets sucked in and destroyed. Maybe if you’d never walked out of Blue Water my baby would never have walked in.”
    Not much affects me, but her words penetrate something so deep inside me and I don’t know how to react or deal with it. “They took her to Blue Water?” I cough, blood staining my lips. This isn’t how things are supposed to be, she didn’t deserve to be in that place. “Get her out,” I demand Blake.
    “I can’t get her out Ryan, I’m only one fucking man. What do you think I can do? It’s too late. I trusted you to take care of her and prevent this from ever happening. This is all on you.”
    It actually hurts me, his words. He was right, this was my fault, I did this to her… to us.
    “No matter what weird claim you think you have on her, she’s our daughter and I want her to get the help she needs Ryan,” Mel tells me.
    I swipe across the counter, knocking all their perfect normal life crap to the floor. “She doesn’t need help! Why do you fucking people always assume we’re sick, she’s not sick, she’s just not like you. Like them!” I roar.
    The slap across my cheek from Melody is a bold, brave action considering I’m three seconds away from killing everyone preventing me from being with Cereus, including them both if it comes to it.
    “You’re not sick Ryan. You were born soulless or lacking empathy, or what ever the hell you want to believe, but she is sick, her mind is fragmented and she’s lost inside there. She needs help. If you care about her the way you appear to, you will know this and let her be where she needs to be.” Melody ends on a sob her legs giving out. Blake catches her and holds her while she sobs uncontrollably.
    Was she right?
    You know she’s right.
    The world around me fades. Blake becomes further and further away from me. I hear him yell my name but it’s distorted and sounds almost in slow motion.
    The empty dark pit inside me consumes me until there’s nothing.

Three weeks and two operations and I’m finally walking out of this place – okay, jumping out the hospital room window isn’t the same as walking out but I was avoiding the officers waiting to question me about the stab wound. Luckily I was still known as Robert Maze according to the records. Blake had been to tell me that Cereus was being assessed but would be contained for the foreseeable future.
    They used the term ‘sociopath’ causing tears to mist Blake’s eyes when he was relaying the information. They referred to me as a psychopath when I was in there and they weren’t wrong, that’s the label they gave men like me. A sociopath, I wasn’t sure if that’s what Cereus was. To me she is just trapped in her darkness and just needs to learn how to take control. The doctors spat a lot of jargon to Blake when he asked for an update on her and it sounds all explainable when they use their terms so Blake and Melody are still convinced Blue Water is where she needs to be.
    They told him sociopaths usually tend to be more