Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 85228 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 426(@200wpm)___ 341(@250wpm)___ 284(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85228 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 426(@200wpm)___ 341(@250wpm)___ 284(@300wpm)
Chapter 18
Jersey
Heat washes over me, and for a moment, I'm able to convince myself that everything is fine. Warmth isn't a bad thing. We need warmth in the form of arms wrapped around you when we're tired. We need warmth when it's cold outside—a warm jacket, a snuggly blanket. Hell, even the air from a vehicle's heating system.
This is a different kind of warmth, one that bites and stings. One that leaves pieces of yourself behind. Leaves you less than you were before you encountered it.
Flames lick at my skin, smoke filling my lungs to the point that I have to stop.
I can hear their voices and feel the rattle of their pleas for help deep in my bones as black, billowing smoke rolls over every inch of my body, making my eyes burn, and my lungs sting with the poison surrounding me.
The house is different than I remember, the tips of my boots catching on furniture that wasn't here the last time I stood in this room.
The smoke clears, just like it always does, the sight of Eden on the couch coming into full view, eyes wide open, needle in her arm, the cigarette she was smoking burning a hole in the couch beside her, although never burning her somehow.
"Daddy!"
The screams continue, two little voices pleading for help. Two tiny people who cry out for me, although I'm helpless and unable to get to them. I never make it. Getting to them is impossible.
Fire licks at my skin, but still, I grope around in the smoke-filled room helplessly.
By some mercy I'm not sure I deserve, I find the doorknob to their room, convincing myself that they'll be okay. The smoke is filling the other room, and Eden closing this door will have saved them.
I open the door only to find flames shooting up the walls, two tiny forms in one bed, even though they each have their own.
The smoke clears as if it is in partnership with whatever force needs me to hurt the most. Only my babies are no longer crying out for me. Like their mother, lifeless eyes stare up at the ceiling, forever unseeing, forever four years old.
I jerk, my body bringing me back to the present. I've had the nightmare enough to know that it isn't real. I never experienced that fire. I never clawed through an unfamiliar room in an attempt to rescue my babies. I never witnessed Eden dead from an overdose as her cigarette started a fire that killed my twin boys.
I was seven hundred miles away, on a job, when that happened. I was so out of touch, so involved in rescuing others, that I had no idea what was going on at home. My own children fell prey to a mother who vowed to care for them, a woman I fell head over heels in love with at first sight. I was so in love that I missed every red flag she waved in my face, too infatuated to see what was really happening.
Eden was damaged beyond repair when I met her, but my history with ICE had me convinced I could change her, and heal her of those wounds. I let myself believe I was enough.
Now I know better, and it took losing my babies to understand that mistake.
I stand from the bed, grabbing my boots and gun before walking out of her bedroom. I don't know if Caitlyn is still asleep or if I managed to wake her during my nightmare, but she doesn't follow me from the room.
I resist the urge to run my hands along my skin. There are no burns, no scars from the way that night shattered my entire world.
There's no outward wound, only the ones that eat away at me on the inside.
I've noticed her looking at the ring on my left hand more than once, and last night she had the courage to actually confront me about it. She's too astute and too observant. She knew without me speaking that I had lost Eden. Her mistake is thinking it was a love lost, but there will never come a day when I could ever forgive her for what she did.
As much as I blame myself for not seeing the warning signs, for being so enamored with her and believing her lies, she's the one who got high, fell asleep, and let my entire world burn to ashes.
I clench my hand tightly just before opening the front door of Caitlyn's little house, fighting the urge to put my fist through a fucking wall. The nightmare is never far away, but in recent weeks, with my change of job, it has been infrequent.
It feels as if it crept up on me tonight because I was lying beside Caitlyn. I have no doubt it's Eden's way of haunting me, reminding me that I don't have it in me to love anyone the way they deserve. In reality, there's no one worth the effort, not after becoming all too aware of just how easily someone can cut me off at the knees.