Deviant Prince [Romano Brotherhood, #2]

9 | Massimo

Drip, drip, drip.

Something cold and wet slithers down the side of my face, tickling my lip.

Drip, drip, drip.

It keeps coming. Plunking into my forehead with more force. Icy cold. Slowly, gradually, I become aware of myself. My face, damp from whatever is falling onto me. My body... arms, legs, fingers, toes, all there. Somehow aching and numb all at the same time, but there nevertheless.

I let awareness rocket through me and spread in a sluggish crawl to the rest of my body.

Yes, I'm fairly certain I'm whole.

A thunderous, blaring noise rips through the air. Panic. Choking. Ears ringing.

Eyes shooting open, I don't fully register my surroundings before scrambling blindly backwards, away from what sounds like a train headed straight for my unsuspecting body.

Something gritty—dust, it seems—is caught in my throat and the next several moments are a horrifying cluster of confusion and desperation to get air into my lungs and become cognizant enough to see where I am.

Gradually, the world shifts into focus.

I'm lying in what appears to be a ditch on the side of a road. Wearing the same thing I had on last night, only now coated nearly head to toe in dirt and speckles of rain that drill down from a greying sky with increasing intensity. Every now and then a car zips by on the cracked, single-lane road.

Looking around me, the only other thing I notice is a warehouse. It's low to the ground and falling apart, certainly condemned and likely teeming with asbestos. Other than that, I'm surrounded by rolling fields and unremarkable foliage, the mountains rising intimidatingly in the distance. 

I carefully stretch my limbs, noting no sign of obvious injury. I can stand and move about just fine, despite the sluggish pull to my body and a disconcerting muddle creeping at the edges of my mind. Like a hailstorm of veiled memories lying just out of reach.

The warehouse's metal doors are locked, which immediately sets off my suspicions. Why would an abandoned warehouse be locked?

It wouldn't.

I try peering into the windows—which are thoroughly boarded—and finding a weak spot in the structure that I can break into. But every spot I could have potentially exploited has been reinforced with more wood and metal.

Eventually forced to tackle the looming issue of where exactly I am and how I'll be getting back, I turn to the road. My watch tells me it's midday, and unless I've been away from myself for longer than a full day, there should only be several hours from early in the morning to now that are unaccounted for.

The last thing I remember is disposing of the foot wrapped in Vivienne's bedsheets. Deciding to give her the ultimatum. She burst uninvited into my home, argued with me, and then... and then, I don't know. 

This is spiraling far too quickly. 

I'm not in control anymore. 

A sudden piercing pain ignites in my left eye and I double over, clutching the spot. The pain is excruciating and there's never been anything I can do to stop it. Often as a child, in the hours following a blackout, I'd get these debilitating headaches. They'd start in one eye, like someone took an ice pick straight to my iris, and eventually bloom across my temple and radiate to my whole head. They were so bad that I'd lie in a catatonic state, sometimes for a couple days, in too much pain to even cry out.

Good to know that the headaches have also carried over into my adulthood.

Certainly looking more pathetic than I care to ever look, I do my best to half walk, half stumble away from the road, towards a tree that looks to have foliage thick enough to block the rain that's now pouring down.