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My lungs screamed, my muscles seized, and my eyes squeezed shut as a cyclone of glowing blue bubbles poked and stabbed at me with the force of a thousand accusing fingertips. But the physical pain, the powerlessness, the overwhelming need to breathe—it all faded away as a new attack began.
From within.
The sensation was just like the vision I’d had on the ship. That feeling of coming up for air, of breaking through the surface of a dark, murky lake to find myself somewhere I’d never been with a girl I’d never met. Only this time, the redhead wasn’t perched in a tree or running through a graveyard or being raped in a kitchen. This time, she was curled up in my lap.
This time, she was mine.
And she was dying.
I knew it before the room finished coming into focus. I could feel it in my chest, in the heart that was breaking just beneath her cheek. It was a crushing, piercing, panicked kind of pain, like the slow closing of an iron maiden’s door. I wanted to run, to claw my way out of that vision and back into the lake. I would gladly drown rather than feel that eviscerating pain for another second, but my movements were beyond my control.
I’d been reduced to a helpless bystander within my own body—forced to watch, but powerless to act.
My eyes traveled down the length of the girl’s long copper hair and found the bottom of her thick, wavy strands stained red. An unfastened belt snaked between her legs and draped over her upper thigh, but I could hardly see it through all the blood. I’d killed more men than I could count, but I’d never seen that much blood in my life. It gushed from her open wound in spurts, timed with the rhythm of her fading heartbeat.
Darby.
I saw her as a child, bright eyes gleaming as she gazed at me with wonder—the feral boy who didn’t speak was never a monster to her, never Satan’s son. I saw her as an adolescent, felt her lips on mine, and heard a voice in my head tell me that our love was true. Then, I saw her as a woman, funeral dress hiked up to her hips as she sprinted barefoot into the woods to find me.
And she did. She always knew where to find me.
But now, my freckle-faced girl, my sunshine in the dark, my only fucking reason for living … was leaving me.
And it was all my fault.
I couldn’t outrun what I was. What I’d done. I’d dragged an angel into hell because I couldn’t live without her, and now, God had come to take her back.
Searing hot tears blurred my vision as I watched the movement behind her eyelids go still, felt her final breaths warm my lips. I clutched her sagging body to my chest as the soul inside of it slipped away. And as it did, my pain went with it.
Because I had made up my mind.
If God wanted to take my girl, he was going to have to go through me.
“I’m comin’ with ya, angel. Ya understand? I’m not lettin’ you go. I’ll never fuckin’ let go.”
I wasn’t in control of my words—I was merely listening to them being spoken—but I agreed with every fucking one of them. The pain was unbearable. I couldn’t live without her. I wouldn’t even try.
Kissing the freckles on her cold left hand—the ones that matched my own—I whispered the blessing I’d heard the day they appeared. According to legend, it meant that she and I had been bonded for eternity. I hoped that was true, but it didn’t fucking matter.
Darby had been my eternity since the moment we’d met.
As I slid the knife from my boot, my awareness shifted to something behind me. We weren’t alone.
Darby’s killer was in the room.
Turning toward him as I lifted the blade into the air, my final breath came rushing in on a startled gasp. Because when I plunged that knife into my own bleeding heart, I was staring into the eyes of a man who’d been born without one.
My own fucking father.
Alexi Abramov.
The woodshop began to flicker and wave as that life slipped away, and the watery hell I’d been submerged in came seeping back into my consciousness.
Falling to the sawdust-covered floor, I watched in horror as Darby’s body rolled out of my limp arms. As she landed on her side and stared back at me with vacant green eyes.
As the room dissolved around us, Darby’s features began to change as well—the angle of her jaw, the slope of her nose, the shape of her lips, and the placement of her freckles. Her copper hair darkened to auburn, and when my own eyes lost focus and went still—like hers, like my ma’s—the last image they saw was a collection of Russian patches blanketing her cold, dead heart.
Clo.
