[center][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019e7cbe-43dc-713a-9c31-7e0fc5f6a725.webp[/img][/CENTER][indent][sub][COLOR=9174cb][I]Eve[/I][/color][/sub][sup][right][/right][/sup][/indent][center][COLOR=dimgray][SUP][sub]_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________[/sub][/SUP][/COLOR][/center]

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It must have been gone 2am when they arrived at the yard, Michael Marino’s concrete yard. Just like Luca had said when he'd found her returning to her apartment. He'd been waiting. Missed calls. Something was urgent, and no it wasn't going to wait for the morning no matter how much Eve protested to sleep instead. [COLOR=9174cb]"What happened?"[/color]  she'd asked, and he'd given nothing. A big, dumb, nothing that had only made her worry. But there he was, Michael Marino, face down in wet concrete. His phone had bounced just inches from his hand mid call and was weighed upright. Even in the dark, three distinct gunshot wounds could be made out across his back. One of Silvio’s longest running Captains. Luca's captain. Silvio's childhood friend, groomsmen at each other's weddings. Reduced to this. Shot in the night, and Silvio wanted to know who. Not just Silvio, four of his other Captains had come too and one had even brought his pitbull with him.

"He's on antibiotics, Sil," he'd said with a shrug. "Need to keep an eye on him."

"If that mutt fuckin' pisses," Silvio had hissed out through gritted teeth before glancing at the hound. He shook his head when he turned away he saw Eve on her way over, the apprehension in her step, the exhaustion in her eyes. "Where the fuck were you?" he asked. He felt so much taller than her in the dark. "Called you four times."

[COLOR=9174cb]"I'm sorry. I'm here now,"[/color]  she answered, she'd drawn her arms around herself. He'd asked for her gifts before. Never like this. Never for a body so fresh. Never one of his own, one of the family. Never with witnesses. [COLOR=9174cb]"What's going on?"[/color] she asked, her hands twitching and trembling with the tension; she already knew. There was a smell here that had not struck the others, it seemed. It had not even found its way to the nose of the pitbull but it was thick as syrup; cloying and sweet and rotten. Eve raised a shaky hand to her mouth but it did nothing to filter the air or the sight. The rot coiled and all began to stir like insects in her ribcage. 

[COLOR=9174cb]"I... Don't want to. Something is wrong,"[/color]  she said, quiet and retreating.

"Eve," Silvio said. The other Captains did not look or pay attention, but they were each of them listening to everything. "I need to know who did this, I need to know now. They were gonna bury him in his own yard." He was clouded by a grief she had never known in him; a grief that sat beneath with a cold rage. He spoke some unintelligible curses under his breath. "You're not leaving until I know."

[COLOR=9174cb]"Please,"[/color] she whispered.

"I'm not asking you twice." He held a pause, unable to look her in the eye. "I have to tell his wife. I have to tell his daughters."

It took her a moment to realise she wasn’t just going to be able to walk away from this, nor did she want to, when she really pressed herself. She’d grown up with Michael too but she dared not think of it right now. Pushed past how she’d had her first kiss with a neighbouring boy in secret at a family barbecue at Uncle Mikey’s. She'd gone to the movies with his daughters. They'd spent weekends at a lake house together. She could barely think about how his wife was the closest figure she had to a mother of her own and then it just stung that she thought that, and how they weren’t even all that close anyway.  

Her gaze passed over the Captains as they stood around and away from the body, none daring to be too close and none daring to catch her eye. Only Eve was given that luxury, to be beside him in death. [COLOR=9174cb]“Whatever you see,”[/color] she whispered in Silvio’s direction, [COLOR=9174cb]“don't interfere.”[/color] Her breath trembled through her teeth and her legs moved before her mind could decide against the course of action, she was pulled there, by a death thread pleading for a witness. Toward the sight of his slaughter she moved, and it was as if she were about to pray and worship beside him. She slipped down to the ground, to her knees. The concrete held shallow pools of his blood now. Her eyes closed in surrender.

[i]Michael’s life was rich.[/i]

A childhood of abuse and teenage years of petty crime all came to the surface like watercolour inks dropped into water, to float in the dark pale with Eve. His wife, their wedding. Silvio and Silvio’s late wife, the birth of his first daughter. Special moments, blooming and awakening in melody of colour; then interspersed with the job and the family. 

[i]Michael’s life was violent.[/i]

So many fights, chasing down debtors when he was younger and had the stamina for it. One such evening, Michael Marino didn’t speak, didn’t scream; he only moved. One strike after the other until the man beneath him no longer made a sound and his own hands were bloodied to his knuckles, one finger crooked slightly where it had met tooth, bone, or both. He waited to confirm a rise and fall of the man’s chest and he tightened his jaw before he walked away. Another memory where he had taken Luca, younger by only a few years or so and handed him a gun. Pointed to another strange, nameless man. Some victim, someone who he claimed deserved it. Michael watched as Luca fumbled and took a shot. It should have taken the man between the eyes, but as the shot broke apart into the air, the round tore his face instead. Brow to cheek with a wet spray as half of his face opened like fruit. He did not fall, but screamed from half a mouth; a horrible, horrible sound. Luca’s grip failed again and the barrel wandered as the man clutched the ruin of his face. The muzzle hovered above the broken face and fired in three more callous shots that echoed infinitely. Eve screamed a silent scream too.

[i]Michael was happy.[/i]

His family home was perfect and he smiled and laughed with his wife and made love to her and shared family dinners with his children and invited his friends and their families to events of importance. Attended funerals together. Family but not by blood. Michael also had a string of mistresses over the years and some of them he was violent with; a side to him that did not exist in the walls of his own home and maybe they were his outlet for desires that did not belong within a white picket fence. Eve saw herself much younger too, memorialised in this death thread playing with his daughters just as she herself remembered, and it had been so long since this had happened that it scared her. 

Every glimpse of Michael’s life moved until the end where it was too hard to say for it was so sudden and he didn’t even know. The concrete yard was dark and there were sounds and then there was nothing. He'd watched before he locked up far too late, he heard something, and then his eyes thought they saw something. A hand sinking into the concrete. He hadn't poured it. Someone had broken in. He wanted to shout out. Incensed someone would have the audacity to break into the Marino concrete yard but then that was it. Three gunshots again. Clean, didn't miss. Pushed a wheeze out of his lungs and that was it. When he hit the floor and wasn't yet dead his instinct was to call Silvio and the call caught the last of his death rattle and then that was it. 

[i]Michael Marino died[/i]

His secrets and his life belonged, in their pieces and their colours to Eve now.

That should have been it, Eve should have left the thread and returned but she could no longer feel herself. 

Something else, someone else called. Clung to her for witness. One by one and four in total. All at once, pushing their remnants and their dreams, laughter, and pain all swimming up through the concrete blanket under which they had been buried. Four more missing greys, discarded into another concrete cage seeping liquid into their lungs. Their last ragged threads, final desires, and dying embers of hope just before the knife. All crowded into her mind, screaming over one another. She instinctively drew her hands to her ears, despite the fact none of it was really noise and nor could it be heard outside of her head. It was a chorus of agony too crowded for mercy. From the ground, from beneath the concrete they came crawling and crying. 

Eve’s spine arched one vertebra at a time and she shuddered back in a cruel and forceful motion as if someone was pulling her strings and folding her backwards over herself. Her eyes shot open moon white as the vision tore into her. 

The sound of a voice, disembodied, the same in all four threads, tying them up tight together in a knot.

[center]𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔱𝔞𝔰𝔱𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔬𝔩𝔡 𝔭𝔯𝔞𝔶𝔢𝔯𝔰 𝔠𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔨 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔰𝔥𝔲𝔡𝔡𝔢𝔯 𝔱𝔥𝔯𝔬𝔲𝔤𝔥 𝔪𝔶 𝔱𝔥𝔯𝔬𝔞𝔱 𝔦𝔫 𝔞 𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔞𝔡𝔶 𝔯𝔢𝔥𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔰𝔞𝔩.
𝔚𝔥𝔢𝔫 ℑ 𝔦𝔪𝔞𝔤𝔦𝔫𝔢 𝔡𝔢𝔳𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔪 𝔴𝔥𝔬𝔩𝔢, 𝔰𝔬𝔪𝔢𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔦𝔫𝔰𝔦𝔡𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔪𝔢 𝔰𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔰 𝔩𝔦𝔨𝔢 ℑ 𝔥𝔞𝔳𝔢 𝔞𝔰𝔨𝔢𝔡 𝔦𝔱 𝔱𝔬 𝔡𝔬 𝔦𝔱𝔰 𝔱𝔯𝔲𝔢 𝔴𝔬𝔯𝔨.[/center]

Her own memories blended with the corruption of the burial ground, the sinking sand. The two worlds bled as one and held her within. On the other side of her vision her waking body had stopped breathing. Tears had pooled and her fingers twitched and fought and her skin turned waxen. Her expression was caught somewhere between torment and the ecstasy of the violence and all the memories of it that had been imprinted upon her in the darkness.

Silvio watched from the sideline, his own hand trembling in the darkness. “Eve?” he asked, breaking the silence with the rasp of his voice. 

“...Honey?”


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