Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 89074 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89074 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
He’s frowning as he turns to me. “Why do you seek out violence? Why do you hurt people?”
The pressure inside me builds.
And builds.
The silence in this goddamn library is starting to feel suffocating, and I wish we were anywhere else.
Because I’m like a pot about to boil over.
Spill everywhere.
My fingers twitch.
“Do you know the full story, about what happened that night at the shore?” I ask him.
The words come out a little strained. It’s odd to find myself talking about something I never talk about with another living soul.
His expression softens, just a little. “With Lune? I know she drowned in the ocean during a storm. I know it’s the worst thing that ever happened to your family.”
I swallow hard past a tight throat. “And are you aware that I watched it all happen?”
He’s silent.
Because I know he wasn’t aware of that.
I tell him the whole story, quietly, sitting at that desk in the library while I look out the window. It’s easier to talk about it when I keep my gaze fixed outside on the night sky and the trees instead of on his face.
I tell him that I saw my sister die.
That I saw it all from the dock.
The stormclouds rolling in.
Lune and her first boyfriend, a gutless guy I hated from the moment I met him, were sharing their first taste of alcohol together on the shore.
The tide rose, and they passed a cheap bottle of apple Schnapps back and forth.
I had told her not to go. That night was the first time she screamed at me, too.
Just fucking leave me alone, Hunter.
It’s funny what happens when you go through enough tragedy for seven lifetimes, all in the blink of an eye.
Lune never used to get angry with me, but she didn’t care about the storm. The tide. The bad feeling in my bones, a deep fear I couldn’t ignore. She chose to head to the shore at midnight with that boy.
I watched them swim out from my place in the shadows on the docks.
The sky was silent until the thunder came.
In a moment the atmosphere seemed to shift, spilling out from the sky in torrential rainfall and relentless wind.
I lost the outlines of their bodies minutes before the worst of it.
My heart slammed in my chest as I ran out across the rocky sand, mostly worried about the stinging cuts on the soles of my feet because I didn’t know something much worse was coming.
The wind whipped a grey mist so thick over the water that I couldn’t have seen their bodies even if they had been still above water. When Lune’s body finally bobbed over to shore, it wasn’t moving. The part of my soul that was taken in that moment didn’t ever come back. Her body washed up on the beach at my knees, mangled and bloodied by the rocks she’d been tossed against, and something inside me died, too.
She was already dead.
That boy, though.
When he came to shore, there was a shred of life still there in his eyes.
And my fear instantly became something else.
I watched the light leave him. I watched him take his last breath, there on the shore, losing blood as the tide carried it out, wave by wave.
There was a moment when he tried to beg.
And I didn’t help.
He wouldn’t have lived anyway. Wouldn’t have even made it back to the rickety beach house we’d been trespassing on earlier in the night. The Schnapps was stolen from some unsuspecting family’s house while they were out on vacation, after all.
We never should have been there. People knew that Lune and I had been best friends for our whole childhood, and that the only person on Earth who cared about me was taken away.
Poor Hunter.
Get him into counseling.
Treat him differently from now on.
They didn’t understand that the thing that broke inside me could never be put back.
The first time I saw death was what made me realize that I’m the type of person who is able to look death in the eyes, unblinking.
And to this day, I can still hear the waves, as they crashed onto the rocks and their sound became almost soothing.
Rhythmic.
Like the beating of a heart.
It was a long time ago now.
Some wounds healed.
Lune was always still with me, even now, but one thing had disappeared.
Fear.
Fear was gone. And what do you do with a lust for revenge when your only true chance at revenge was already dead?
You find it wherever you can get it.
9
Rayne
Weston and Noah are laughing across the room, but my thoughts are somewhere far away.
“Royal. You studying that history textbook or the birds outside that window?” Weston says, tapping his knuckles on a side table to get my attention.
I shut the thick European History book on my lap, running my fingers through my hair.
A guilty heat pools in my body when Weston talks to me.