I couldn't feel anything, but yet I felt everything.

I laid in the street, unable to move and unable to scream.

It was dark—the Saint Denis backstreets only lit by dim streetlights that were few and far in between each other. It was late and late enough that everyone had moved indoors until the first light. By that time, I didn't know what I would be…if anything.

It felt as if my body was filling with liquid flame. It started in my toes, working its way up my legs, my stomach, arms, up through my chest and my neck, ending in my head that burned like blue flames.

The heat... The feeling of burning alive didn't stop. I choked on my screams. The pain was too intense to part my lips. The charring of my insides; burning every cell, every nerve ending, every fiber of me—paralyzed me even though I wanted to do nothing more than to writhe on the hard street below me. I wanted so desperately to escape the pain and cry out.

How long I had been laying here burning up from the inside, I didn't know. I was losing my perception of time and a dark heaviness fleeted across my body. Despite the agonizing burn, a feeling of an ethereal confusion sat at the forefront of my brain.

A slew of memories, unable to be stopped, flooded my thoughts. Vivid memories of my parents…when they were healthy and happy. Vivid memories of my parents…when they were sick and unwell. Vivid memories of their funeral. Vivid memories of running away because I didn't want to be put into an orphanage. I could feel the exact feelings and emotions of those moments. Memories of meeting Dutch, Arthur, John, who had become my father and brothers, and the rest of the gang as they filtered into our dysfunctional family. I felt the happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy, the confidence of each moment I had experienced in my lifetime.

The memories stopped with the night of my nineteenth birthday. A void of dead space between being taken and until now.

At the height of the pain, the hotter the burn, that is when I was able to see what had happened to me. That was when I was able to see who had taken me from my family.