Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 98819 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 494(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98819 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 494(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
“That’s incredible.”
“No, it’s not. Because I can’t. I fail.” I clench my teeth.
“Shhh,” he brushes a hand over my hair. “It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not. They started the night. . .” I can’t say it.
“The night,” he says for me. He knows the night I’m referring to.
“Yes. The night. . . he came.” Shards of glass line my throat, but I make myself say it. “The night my family died.”
19
Inara
* * *
Rex and I stare at each other. Our faces are inches away. I’ve told him a secret I’ve carried for years, one he seems to know. “How did you know?”
“Because.” He toys with my hair, slow to answer. I sense this is as hard for him to share as it is for me. “I know what it’s like to look in the face of evil. To have it change the course of your life. To unlock something inside of you, something you have to keep hidden because no one else will understand.”
I understand him perfectly. Our families’ deaths broke something. Our lives continued but were forever changed.
“You have a gift.”
I shake my head. “A curse.”
“It’s a gift,” he insists.
“No, you don’t understand.” I fight to sit up. He rises with me but doesn’t let me out of the circle of his arms. “It was my fault. I dreamed their deaths.” I’ve opened the well of secrets, and now the poison bubbles out. “He killed them as I lay there. I did nothing!”
“You were a child—”
“I knew.” I thump his chest with my fists. “I knew, and I did nothing.”
“You did. You survived. It was all you could do.”
I’m back there, in my ten-year-old bedroom, hearing the creak of the floorboards. Watching the blood drip from the knife.
“Inara,” Rex calls me back to him. “It was his fault. He’s the monster who came for your family—”
“I could’ve stopped it. I was supposed to stop it.” I bury my face in my hands. “I saw the Green Street Murders before they happened. The same with Emily Rodriguez. I’ve dreamed of all the victims. It’s my fault that they’re dead. My fault.” Telling this to Rex feels like carving open my chest with a knife. There’s nothing but air between him and my beating heart. All he has to do is reach out and crush it in his fist.
But he doesn’t. He closes his fingers around my wrists and draws my hands down. “No, little bird. It was him. It was not you. It was never you. You have nothing to apologize for. Whatever younger Inara did, it was what she needed to do. Whatever she said, whatever she did or didn’t do, it was right.”
I answer with a sob.
“Feel your pulse.” He guides my fingers to a spot under my jaw. “Feel that? That means you won.”
I let my hand slip away. “I don’t want to feel this way anymore.”
“Then give it to me. Give it all to me. Let me take it. I’m strong enough, little bird. I’m strong enough to carry it.”
Oh, how I want that. I want to give in to him fully. It’s so tempting. I could lay all my burdens on him and live freely in his dark control.
“You lived through it.” I squint at him. It’s dark, but I can see his aura, the infinite blackness like a midnight sky. “You know what it’s like.” I sense the truth he’s hiding, and it tumbles out of me like I’m an oracle channeling a message from the beyond. “You think it’s your fault your parents died. You think you could’ve stopped it.”
His silence tells me I’m correct.
“You were a little boy,” I tell him.
“You were a little girl,” he reminds me.
I have a flash of memory. The old journals in his room—the ones I found where he wrote about me. “Is this why you wanted to find me?”
He tilts his head up to the ceiling. What little light there is in the room caresses his handsome face. “You understand.” He blows out a breath. He doesn’t want to share the way I’m sharing, but his truth is the price for mine. “It started as a childhood obsession. I was caught in a world of pain and fear. I knew you’d understand my pain as I understood yours.” He cups my face. All my life, I’ve longed for someone to hold me just like this. And now he’s here, and my heart is cracking open. “I’m here for you, Inara. For your pleasure and your pain. I want it all.”
All those years he spent searching for me. It’s come to this moment. I believe everything he says.
But there’s more to tell him.
“I see death before it happens.” This is it, the moment we break from each other forever. “I saw my family’s death. My mother and father, my two brothers. But after. . . after. . . I also saw my grandmother’s death. I went to stay with her, and I saw her in a dream. One day, I went to school, and when I came home. . . she was there at the table, clutching her heart.”