Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 112398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 562(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 562(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
If he’d fully succumbed and welcomed the wickedness. A willing vessel to inflict pain.
Only I had no time. There was nothing I could do but let that rattled ball of grief go when the man brought the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
It rang out, and the man crumpled to the ground.
My legs wobbled from the horror, and I dropped to my knees on the pitted pavement.
Pax rushed around the front of the car, and he curled his arms around me from behind and tried to get me onto my feet.
“We have to go, Aria. We need to get out of here.”
“Peter,” I wept. “We were too late. We were too late.”
“I know. I know. I know, baby.” He mumbled it against the top of my head. “But we have to go.”
I gasped through the tears that blurred my eyes, and I swore I could hear Ambrose’s laughter roll through the trees. His satisfaction that he had taken another of us.
His words from that night infiltrated my mind. The vitriol.
This life is filled with many mysteries, is it not? A child lying in their bed, waking to a paradise unseen, believing they are a chosen one. But no . . . that paradise is only a shroud. A cover for the affliction we’re to be given. A man walking in darkness. Charged with a burden unlike any other would ever be asked. Asked to carry an albatross so great he’s on his knees, both night and day. But why suffer when we can be so much greater than that?
Awareness pulsed through my consciousness, and I rasped, “I remember. I remember where I saw his name.”
Chapter Ten
Pax
I resisted the urge to speed out of the neighborhood like a maniac, instead gritting my teeth as I drove slowly, taking one quiet street and then another. The whole time, I kept one hand on Aria’s thigh like it might be enough to stanch the shaking that wouldn’t quit as she sat gasping in the passenger’s seat.
Whatever epiphany she’d had locked on her tongue.
All while searching out the windows to make sure no one paid us any mind. Hoping no one had witnessed what had gone down between Peter and that bastard, and pinned us as being there.
It was one of the most painful things I’d ever had to experience. Trying to protect Aria the best way that I could, all while feeling like a piece of shit that I’d had to leave my brother’s body in a pool of his blood on the snow-covered lawn.
I was too fuckin’ late to save him, and unable to risk making an anonymous call. Could only hope someone would be out walking their dog or something soon and find them, or had maybe heard something and come out to investigate.
We finally made it to the other end of the neighborhood, and my heart hammered as I came to a stop at the intersection of two larger streets. I made a left and wound into the traffic, becoming one with the mass.
We hadn’t traveled a quarter of a mile when sirens suddenly cut through the dense air. All the cars pulled off to the side as a cruiser came blazing down the street from the opposite direction. Four more followed, whipping by in a blur of flashing lights.
My hand tightened on Aria’s thigh, and I glanced in the rearview mirror to see them all make a right into the neighborhood we’d just come out of.
Guessed it hadn’t taken long at all for someone to find them.
Wasn’t sure if I was relieved or worried.
“Do you think anyone saw us?” Aria whispered into the anxiety hovering over us.
“I don’t think so. I would imagine it’s going to look pretty cut-and-dried to the investigators.” A murder-suicide they could easily wrap up. “They likely won’t be looking for anyone else unless someone specifically saw us get out of the car.”
Aria barely nodded as she sank lower into the seat.
I started to pull back onto the road, then had to immediately pull back off when an ambulance came barreling through.
“I hate this,” she rasped through her grief.
“I know, baby. I know.”
Once we got back onto the road, I started to take a bunch of turns, getting us lost in a maze of businesses and homes, before I finally broke back into the downtown area. I pulled off at a picnic stop that sat on the side of the murky river.
Everything was painted in a thick coating of snow. The tables and the trees and the roofs of the buildings.
It covered the park area, too, right up to the edge of the river that cut through.
I had planned on just leaving the car running so we could talk, but Aria tossed open the door and got out.
She lifted her face toward the bulbous gray clouds that hung heavy from the sky.