The Guru: Shadow (Dark Triad #1)

1. Emma

1

EMMA

PLAYLIST: SUMMER RAIN - EVERLAST

S ilent scratches filled the empty room as words poured like a waterfall onto the journal pages. Faster than her hand could follow a wild mess of letters pressed forcefully on the paper. So many emotions overwhelmed her, engulfing her entire existence in a hurricane of anger, despair, and endless self-loathing. Her veins, intoxicated with burning rage, pulsated through her body while her heart ached from the darkness consuming it, whispering the painful melody of betrayal into her.

She should cry. Only the tears didn’t come.

Maybe I’ve used up all the tears for this lifetime.

Nothing seemed to ever work out for her.

Fucking nothing.

Her friends were busy building big careers, while she couldn’t even finish her studies, let alone keep a job longer than half a year.

My friends.

More like the few people who somehow haven’t abandoned me – yet.

To her, maintaining friendships was the most exhausting thing on earth. Well, aside from existing. And working 9-5 in a dull job with no purpose.

The worst with those so-called friendships was that she always had the bittersweet perception of being too much, not truly belonging; like being a rabbit in an ocean of sharks with no shore in sight. No one seemed to get her, and at some point, she just stopped explaining.

Everyone kept going on with their lives, pushing themselves to new achievements, reaching all their goals – from promotions to babies – while her life spun right around like a hiccupping washing machine, until nothing was where it should be.

Welcome to my personal hell.

The one thing she had was Chris. Well, not anymore. He had been her fiancé. Emphasizing the had . She and Chris had been a couple for almost three years. It was he who proposed out of the blue. She never planned nor expected to marry, ever. It was he who pressured her into getting engaged. As she remembered his endless talks of why she had to say yes, they mixed with the vivid images from a week ago, and it fed her rage like a starved lion presented with raw meat.

He fucking fucked Sami.

My best fucking friend.

He fucked her all the fucking time.

And she-she-!

“ Fucking liars!” she shouted into the emptiness of the room. So loud it made her cat jump from her pillow with an angry hiss.

In a crushing moment of everlasting anger, fired by Chris’ betrayal, she had thrown every last bit connected to him out of the window of their fifth-floor apartment – except for the heavy stuff, as she had no intentions of crushing an innocent pedestrian underneath.

Said heavy stuff was now squeezed into their guest room. His music equipment, the couch, the chairs, table, an armchair, and some other things. At least what was left of it. Fuelled by anger, she had actually taken a knife and destroyed all of it. The couch and armchair looked as if a mass murder had happened on them, stabbed a thousand times with the knife until nothing of the upholstery was left intact. She had had the hope it would calm her rage and fill the bitterness of betrayal, but it did not. Especially when Chris let her know he didn’t care about the stuff and she should keep or throw it away.

So much about revenge .

Now she sat on the living room floor, leaning against the wall, her journal on her lap. Only a vast collection of books lay in staples in one corner; otherwise, the room was empty. Reluctant curtains, which did not want to come off, suffered the same fate as the upholstery. As they now hang there, tattered, and ripped apart, they gave the room a spooky, abandoned building atmosphere.

A perfect resemblance to her entire existence.

My life. An empty fuckhole of pain and betrayal.

The images of how she had come home early a week ago and saw Sami riding her fucking fiancé on her fucking couch into fucking ecstasy and oblivion still tormented her in her mind. So much, it felt like someone had stabbed her with a dagger in her heart and pulled it out, only to push it right back in.

The fire she had seen in Sami’s eyes, the grin flashing over her face when their eyes met, still let an all-shattering icy chill run down her spine. Sami wanted her to find out. Her best friend wanted her to find her fucking her fiancé. The grandest of all betrayals rooted in such depth that the everlasting pain of it made her sick to the level of throwing up. Smashing and destroying things wasn’t enough anymore. The only outlet left for her anger was pain and control. In other words, she needed to cut something open.

I need a release.

A release for all the overwhelming, consuming emotions.

A release for the images tormenting her mind.

A release for the hate she felt towards everyone and herself.

For a moment, her gaze wandered down to her right forearm, reminding her visibly how often she couldn’t cope, like a personal account of all her life’s failures.

Because my life is so fucked up .

I am so fucked up.

Thanks to my fucked-up parents.

And the fucked up world.

Right now, the word fuck wasn’t even enough to cover the magnitude of shit in her life.

I need control.

So, she stood up, got the biggest knife from the kitchen, and returned to her pre-warmed spot on the otherwise cold hardwood floor.

The only two people in the world she had ever trusted betrayed her. A part of her had realized it, and yet she did not.

So, she let the blade, in a rush of betrayal eating her soul, glide with pressure over her skin. Not too deep, but deep enough to watch her skin part and feel warm blood emerge from the wound. She needed it. To feel the pain, feel the control, feel the power.

In retrospect, the worst of the whole situation was the audacity Chris had, telling her straight to the face that it was her fault he did it. His exact words were, ‘You are so uptight, Emma! It is normal for a man to fuck others, especially when you’re never opening your legs for me.’

Recalling these words made her feel sick with anger. The injustice of it was beyond what she could handle. He was the one sticking his dick into her best friend, and he had the audacity to blame her for it. Never had she expected him to be capable of such a betrayal, of such lengths. Never.

How could I have been such a poor judge of character with him? Why didn’t I see it?

With a second cut, she cracked the skin open on her forearm once again, coloring it in a beautiful deep red.

If there was one thing in the world, she couldn’t stand, it was injustice.

Well, and the lies.

Okay, there are two things, but damn, I fucking hate it!

If there was a single person far away from uptight, it was her. It was him being an absolute dickhead, trying to make himself feel better. He, with his wounded ego from never getting her off and pressuring her for sex, now sought to place the blame on her.

She pressed the knife onto her arm one last time. It slid through her skin like a hot knife through butter.

Three times. Like always. Only this time, the relief she craved didn’t come. Frustrated, she stabbed the knife with force into the hardwood floor. The loud thud issuing from it resounded in the empty room.

She turned around to let herself fall backwards onto the floor while she stretched her legs up against the wall. The cold hardwood beneath her felt warmer and softer than her heart right now. Lying here, she let herself take in the sensation on her arm, the warm blood slowly floating out of the cuts with their sweet prickling sensations. It was supposed to hurt more. Make her more grounded in reality.

What have I done to always get hurt?

Why can’t I, for once, be happy?

My whole life is such a fucking mess.

My entire childhood, just everything.

Even after all those years, it still hunts me.

At that moment, to add up to everything, her cat retched.

“ Seriously?” she asked her, but the cat, of course, did not answer except for a derogate look from her high horse of somehow being the superior species. Maybe she was. For sure she was.

Getting up to clean up after her? No energy left. What did it matter anyway? Her body felt heavy as if her bones were made from steel.

Completely drained, she reached mindlessly for her phone. Her last resort was to numb herself with doom scrolling through social media.

When she opened Instagram, she almost dropped her phone on her face. Her heart plummeted, and if she hadn’t been lying on the floor already, it might have just slid out of her body.

“You got to be kidding me!”

There it was – a lovely image of Sami and Chris on a beach, her in a white dress with a fucking ‘Just Married’ arch around them.

After a fucking week!

Her eyes flew to the caption.

“You. Always,” she read out loud to make herself process it. Three hearts followed the text.

This is a joke, right?

Only it was not. Her mind started spinning again in a blurry hurricane of blind, uprooted rage.

She needed to get the image out of her mind. Fast. So she scrolled.

Her eyes fell onto an ad. ‘Do you want to be happy? Live the life you deserve? Learn how to attract whatever you want in only four hours.’

What bullshit . And only to prove her point, she clicked on it.

There was this woman, Lauren T. Sanders, her name, long brown hair playing softly in the wind, covered in golden tattoos, while she sat with her legs crossed in an expensive-looking house with a view onto palms and the ocean.

She talked about how her life radically changed to the best life possible after she used her method. How she manifested all her wealth by changing her energy and mindset. And how everyone could do it.

Utter rubbish, she thought and threw her phone in the corner while letting herself fall back down onto the hardwood.

If it’s that easy, poverty wouldn’t exist, nor injustice, no racism or exploitation would happen, and everybody would be rich as fuck. It’s the same shit my mother believed in, and look where it got her.

Unsure of how long she had been staring at the ceiling, but when her phone vibrated, the day had become night and the blood on her arm had dried into a dark red crust.

Once.

Twice.

“Fuck off,” she cursed.

Thrice.

Only she couldn’t ignore it any longer, as curiosity beat exhaustion.

Hello FOMO, old friend.

So, she heaved herself off the floor and picked up her phone from the corner.

After she dismissed the battery warning, telling her to charge, she saw the stupid ad was still running, a big button bumping in her focus. ‘You’ll always be stuck if you don’t invest in yourself! It’s only $199 today.’

Ten points for marketing: making people believe they need to invest in someone else to make their problems go away.

As she slid down the notification center, she saw three messages from Julie.

Julie

Em, r u alright?

Gotta tell you sth

Meet in an hour, Stone’s?

No, not interested.

Especially not at Stone’s, the rich people’s place where everybody was out of her league while rubbing it in her face of how much of a failure she was.

Julie was her oldest friend and the complete opposite of herself. She was the incarnation of happiness. Her glass was always more than half full and endlessly refillable. She smiled so much, laughed energetically and everything about her was simply magnetic. She had loving parents who had their lives under control, weren’t sick, and, on top of all, financed her life, so she had a debt-free start with an Ivy League education.

Julie got the perfect job in her dream company straight out of university because Julie had something she didn’t: connections, discipline, and an enthralling trust in life. Everything she touched became somehow a success, and on top of that, she had this big circle of true and reliable friends.

She was not one of Julie’s reliable friends. She was a chaotic mess that always rescheduled last minute, had all the drama stories, and literally nothing she touched seemed to work out. But they had known each other since diaper days, so she was always considered when something was to be celebrated. And Julie celebrated a lot.

Julie

Em, I know you read it

Get out of your shell

we need to celebrate!!!

What’s the occasion?

Big. Tell you then

She groaned as she closed the app, absolutely not in the mood for anything loud and social, especially something like the Stone’s, where she had to get herself all dressed up. Chris had been the social one. He had dragged her with him to all those events and get-togethers, entertaining everyone, while she would have been anywhere but there. She loved her books, peace and quiet, cuddling on the couch with her cat.

The couch.

The couch stabbed in the guest room.

The couch Sami and Chris fucked on.

Them getting married within a week.

Every muscle in her body tensed again, and with it came the bittersweet taste of everything being planned, and her anger got the best of her. To hell would she rot here while he was having the time of his life. She’d show him what he had lost.

Need an hour