Total pages in book: 150
Estimated words: 148434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 742(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 742(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
I already have a name for her, and everyone here will give me shit for it. So I just say, “LJ.”
“LJ?” Jane frowns for a second.
“I love it.” Audrey adjusts her bonnet.
“You don’t even know what it stands for, Audrey.” Eliot grins, deviously. “It could be something horrible like Lube—”
Jane cuts him off in French, and I recognize a couple words. The ones that mean little devil.
I make a call and decide to rip this Band-Aid fast.
“LJ is short for Little Jane.”
Silence layers across the table before Tom and Eliot explode into laughter. Ben and Audrey pound the table with their fists, and almost everyone drums the ground with their feet. Charlie clinks his glass with the back of a knife.
Living breathing noise rumbling around us.
“They love it,” Jane explains to me. “As do I.”
I’m constantly in awe of her, and now, I’m in awe of her family. More orderly but disordered sound reverberates and floods the room when Rose and Connor arrive hand-in-hand.
What happens next is history.
My history.
Maybe they never explained these dinners because you can’t. I’m twenty-eight, but here—no person is older or younger. Time is frozen, and a soul-bleeding feeling sings and screams—an experience that philosophers and mathematicians would fail to encapsulate.
I’d try.
But then again, I’d rather carry their secrets to my grave.
44
THATCHER MORETTI
“SKY! SKYLAR!” I yell out and drop my bike. I bolt into pitch-black water. Soaked up to my waist before I swim, and I reach the facedown floating body, turning my brother over—our gold necklaces snag. My strong pulse beats in my ears, and gripping him, I swim and pull. I drag him to the graveled shore.
My strong pulse beats.
Water drips down my eyelashes. I lie him down, chained at the necks, forced to stay close.
It beats.
I pump on his chest.
It beats.
I blow breath into his mouth and compress his chest—Skylar jolts up and grabs my arms in panic. “Thatch!”
My eyes snap open, a cold sweat coating me. Nightmare—just a fucking nightmare. I stay still and blink a few times, my pulse on a decent. Fuck me. I blink and gather spatial awareness. I’m in Jane’s bedroom.
Our room.
She sleeps peacefully beside me, tucked under a purple blanket. Naked, both of us, except for the cornic’ around my neck and my dog tags around hers. Quietly, I grab my phone off the nightstand and check the time, squinting as the screen lights up in the darkened bedroom. It’s zero three hundred hours.
Early. Too early for sunlight.
I lie back, head to pillow, and I smear a hand over my eyes. My nightmares are always related to my time in the military—I can’t remember ever having one about that night in the quarry.
Back when I was twelve and Sky was fifteen, my brother—he never woke up.
I try to think about other things. Like how it’s nearing the end of March, and we’re only three days away from Tony’s transfer to Charlie’s detail. And him becoming the Omega lead.
Yeah, that’s not making me feel any better.
To slow my heart rate, I take a few deep, measured breaths, and I smell something…
I sniff the air.
My pulse shoots back up, and I narrow my gaze on the door.
Filmy lines of smoke billow underneath and spill into the room.
I’m on my feet in a split-second. “Jane.” I tug on my drawstring pants, then I jostle my fiancée. “Jane!”
She flinches awake. “What, Thatcher?” Panic strikes her eyes as I leave the bed to cross the room and swing open the closet.
“Oh my God.” She sees the smoke pooling inside, and while I grab the fire extinguisher behind a shoebox, she hurriedly puts on panties and my black crewneck. And she glances at the wall. “LUNA! WAKE UP!”
Her cats—our cats. They barrel to the front of my mind.
I sprint out. Smoke skates across the second-floor landing and narrow staircase, stinging my eyes. I cough into my bicep and yell up towards the attic, “MAXIMOFF! FARROW!”
The fire isn’t coming from their room.
I slam a fist on a second-floor bedroom. “LUNA!” She’s a heavy sleeper. Could take more than that to wake her—but I run downstairs to stop the fire.
Heat is pouring from the first floor. The cracking sound is as violent as the sweltering temperature, and I enter an absolute fucking horror scene. Fire spreads to the ceiling, eats the floorboards, attacking the wood foundation, and it tries to crawl up the brick walls.
Pink loveseat in flames, but the kitchen—the kitchen is engulfed, maybe in seconds. I extinguish the living room, protecting the front door exit.
“BANKS!” I yell at the adjoining door.
My brother.
SFO.
They’re asleep in the other townhouse. The door opens, and Donnelly almost blows back. “Shit.” He’s been crashing on security’s couch. I remember Akara spent the night here too. He hasn’t moved back to the gated neighborhood yet.
I throw the empty extinguisher, abandoning the task.