Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 137017 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 685(@200wpm)___ 548(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137017 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 685(@200wpm)___ 548(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
“I’m sorry.” Kalon dropped back to the bed and wrapped me in his arms. “You’re right. I promised you I’d listen. I’m not angry. I’m sorry.”
He cradled the back of my head, and I desperately grasped at his shirt, letting my tears fall freely.
Had I been keeping this inside ever since that moment?
“Don’t cry like that, my Allie. I can’t stand it. I’m sorry.” His voice was muffled as he buried his face in my hair. “Is that why you were so upset after we saw her?”
I nodded. “I thought you mi-might…”
“I didn’t,” he said firmly. “It didn’t even cross my mind. How could I look at her when I have you by my side, hm?”
I tried to speak, but the tears that flowed were like a culmination of my emotions over several days, and I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. Everything I’d kept inside exploded out of me in a tidal wave of emotion I couldn’t control anymore.
Kalon scooped me up and sat back against the head of bed. He plopped me in his lap and cradled me against his body, wrapping me up in his arms so tightly that all I could do was sob all over his shirt and hold onto him for dear life.
He said nothing as I released everything I’d been holding onto. I couldn’t even say how long it took for me to cry it out, but his hold on me only loosened once I’d calmed down.
“You can let me go now,” I whispered.
“I don’t think so.” He tightened his embrace once again. “What made you change your mind? Did something happen during the hunt?”
I nodded against his chest. “She came to find me later on, and we didn’t have the nicest of conversations. She all but said she had no intention of giving up on you, and there’s a very slim chance I might have threatened her.”
“You might have threatened her?”
“Okay, fine, I threatened her. Indirectly.” I sniffed, stretching one of my legs out. “I told her I don’t show mercy to those who covet what’s mine.”
He groaned, burying his face in my hair. “Don’t talk like that unless you can take responsibility for what it does to me.”
Kalon totally had a possessiveness kink. I could not be convinced otherwise.
“I thought you might reject my handkerchief based on what I knew from the book I’d read, so when you rejected hers and accepted mine and did… that… in your tent, I realised that maybe this wasn’t going to go the way I thought. Maybe it was okay for me to want you. To want to stay in Stein.”
“I would be upset if you didn’t.” He kissed the top of my head.
“But now I know for sure that it’s okay because of what happened after I collapsed.”
“After you collapsed? I don’t understand.”
“I sort of… woke up… but I was in a weird place. I was by the ocean, and I didn’t understand what I was doing there. I was missing a whole chunk of my memories, but it wasn’t until God showed up that I remembered our first meeting and everything he told me then.”
“God.” Kalon paused. “As in… Khimos? On a beach?”
Right.
Khimos was God here.
I’d keep the orange Hawaiian shirt to myself. No need to sully the weirdo’s name in public, after all.
“I guess so, but to me, he’s just God. That was his name in my religion in my past life,” I explained, toying with a loose string on one of Kalon’s shirt buttons. “He couldn’t tell me everything in our first meeting, and I apparently bargained with him for the memories of both my soul and this body, so he took the memory of our time together in exchange. I was quite irritated when I found that out, but I finally learnt the truth. I did read about this world in a book, but it was only one of many timelines this world has gone through. What I read is not the destined path.”
“How did you read about it?”
“Something about reincarnations who remember their past lives and write them in their new lives,” I explained vaguely. “He said there might be stories from my past world in this one, so I’m going on a hunt through the library when we get back to Stein.”
“Of course. It’s your library anyway.”
That was the sexiest thing anyone had ever said to me.
I cleared my throat. “Anyway, um, basically, I said how my soul was brought here after Alicia’s accident, right?”
Kalon nodded, stroking my hair.
“I’m not just a random soul who ended up here. I’m the original Alicia. I lived four lives in this world before God took my soul for safekeeping.”
It sounded completely insane when I said it out loud.
“Ever since the end of my first life, this world has been in a loop of regression, triggered by my untimely death,” I explained softly. “God replaced my soul with another after my fourth murder.”