Control (Dark Romance)

Chapter 41

Hagen's P.O.V

I fucked up.

I really, really, really fucked up.

I fucked up a lot— I wasn't the type of guy that got things right on the first try... or the second, but usually, my mistakes had a way of working themselves out. That wouldn't happen this time. This time was worse than all the rest.

This time... I fucked up.

I don't know how long I've been standing here, staring straight ahead, but I can't even imagine moving. Moving would make it real, and I—...

... I stay still, looking ahead at the empty space across from me, where he'd been standing, and I just keep... staring at it, and the longer I do, the harder it is to keep standing here like I'm not choking on every breath.

My chest cages up, trying to contain the crime scene that was my mangled heart, but despite its efforts, I'm left panting so hard I think I'm hyperventilating, and I know I need to sit down before I fall. But still, I don't move a step out of place.

I don't know why I don't. It wouldn't make a difference if I waited here until the day I died, he wouldn't come back.

My hands fist at my sides as my breathing gets worse and I need to sit down, but I don't dare. I keep waiting, even when I know it's useless.

Nikola wouldn't ever come back, not in a few days, months or years. When Nikola was finished with something, he wiped it from his mind and put it to bed, and he was finished with me.

I blink past the tears quickly welling in my eyes and try to breathe, cause that's what you were supposed to do when you were scared, but it wasn't working. How could it when I was so fucking terrified?

It wasn't just because of the words he'd said... those painful, bare, torturous words that had torn me and everything about me apart until I was no better than the ruins of our bond. He'd left those words behind, but nothing else.

There were points in my life when I'd thought I'd lived happily without Nikola's magic around me. Those were the years I was 'free'. First, it was when his attention had taken the extreme turn that made Dad step in, and then again, when I'd turned 18 and he'd left me alone until the night he'd shown up on my doorstep for our first date, but I'd been wrong.

Nikola's magic had been there the entire time.

It'd never strayed, it had just taken a new form— a smaller form, but it'd always been there— some invisible, secret tendril that I'd never noticed until he was gone and had taken it with him, along with the parts of him I had always felt.

Now, I was laid bare to the world for the first time and I hated it.

I felt naked. No, worse than that. I felt like some layer of me, some second skin, had been stripped away, and I couldn't fucking breathe without it— without him. But he was gone, and after what I did, after the screaming match we'd just had, he wasn't coming back.

"Fuck." The word comes out like a ripple curse and I try my best to relax, but my fingers are shaking and my vision keeps blurring. I'm about to throw up and I don't know what to do. I have no idea what to do when my thoughts are now so quiet.

A few minutes ago, my head was pounding with thoughts so deafening and so ferocious that I had to say them out loud, and now, it's so terribly quiet, and... he's not coming back.

"Fuck," I whimper as my legs stumble back, and that's it. I should've stayed there, waiting exactly where he'd left me, because the moment I'm not, it all comes crashing down.