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I can’t reply, because there’s a tube inside my throat.
I start to cry.
“Hey, hey. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be fine. You hear me?”
I do, but I can’t believe him.
I was locked in a room set ablaze. On purpose. Someone wanted me dead. How could I ever be okay again? The fear, the recollection of the utter certainty of my impending death is too much.
A male nurse in blue scrubs enters the room. “Ms. Reyes! I’m Jonathan. I’ve been taking care of you for the last few hours. I’m glad you’ve come through.”
He calmly explains to me that the tubes are helping get some air into my lungs—I inhaled too much smoke. He checks the machines I’m plugged in to alongside an IV I hadn’t even noticed and tells me he can remove them now.
Please, please, please, my eyes say, and he must have understood, because he does it.
My throat hurts. I look down at my bandaged hand.
“You were very lucky your friend here came to check on you,” the nurse says, gesturing to Jason.
I’m crying again.
“The door. It was locked. How…”
“I broke it down. You were right behind, so it hit your head,” he adds apologetically.
The sobbing coming out of me is incontrollable. I’m alive. He saved me. He came to check on me.
I fall asleep.
Jason’s sleeping the next time I come to. My bladder is making itself known. I look at the IV in my arm, and grab the liquid pouch it’s plugged in to, before rushing to the toilet in my hospital room.
Things are clearer now. My nerves are less frayed. I can think more or less clearly.
Someone did try to kill me, and there could be only one reason why they would.
There’s nothing special about me. I don’t have tons of money, like most of my peers. I don’t have true enemies—no one who could have an actual reason to want me dead.
Except for the boy next to me.
Being with Jason is a rush like nothing else. Getting lost in the flow of art doesn’t compare. He’s the sweetest poison, everything that should make me run a mile drawing me in.
I think back to the poor cat killed just this Monday because of Jason making me a target. One week later, it could have been me.
There’s a new player in the game Jason and I began, and they have their own set of rules.
If I stay with him, I could be the next corpse he buries.
I can’t do this. To him or to me.
YEARS AGO
Jace
The boy who looked like me rested against velvet and wood, unmoving, as if asleep. For the first time in our eight years, Alexander seemed smaller than me. I suppose it wasn’t impossible that I might have gained half an inch or so on him. My twin was younger than I was now, because he spent the last few days dead.
He shouldn’t have been dead. Death was for the old, and the sick, and anyone who wasn’t Alexander Alden. My brother. My reflection. My everything.
He was dead, and I should have been too.
