Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 116263 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116263 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 581(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
A single tear got free and slipped down my cheek.
“He deserved it,” Pax growled as if he’d felt the ground shift. The piece of me that cracked away and couldn’t be reclaimed.
“Because of me,” I whispered.
“No. He’s dead because he’s evil. Because he welcomed it. He wasn’t innocent in this, and you hold none of the blame.”
I knew it. I knew it the second I’d thought to reach out to touch him.
To try to bind the wickedness through his mind.
Only, rather than the overpowering urge to place my hands on him the way I’d experienced in the facility—with Jenny, with the others—I’d been repulsed. My soul had persuaded me there had been no way to reach him. No way to pull him from the vile depths where his spirit had descended.
It didn’t make any of this any easier, though. It didn’t erase the vision of him falling over the railing and smashing into the ground.
And it did absolutely nothing to eradicate the mess we were in.
Fear trembled through me. Stark and devastating.
“You’re worth any sacrifice.” Pax said it as if he’d read my thoughts. As if he had direct access to them. As if he could feel every beat of my heart.
I squeezed my eyes closed for a flash of a second. “I just want us to be free, Pax.”
“The only thing that matters is that you’re safe.”
“And what if I want you safe?”
“I’ve already accepted my fate in this.” His voice rang with finality.
That was a fate I refused to entertain. “Well, I don’t accept it.”
“There’s no price I wouldn’t pay for you, Aria.” His voice was a blade, cutting through the energy that screamed between us.
His penetrating gaze burned into the side of my face.
The words carved directly on my soul.
“This life never made any sense to me,” he said slowly, his words a low rasp. “I couldn’t understand why. How we could be given such a burden. If it was even real. If I even existed. I didn’t get any of it. Not until two nights ago when I first saw you.”
Longing wound through the pain, and I glanced his way to find those glacial eyes staring back. I returned my attention to the road as I whispered, “A piece of me came alive that moment, too.”
“But it’s a piece of us we can’t keep.”
“Does it have to be?” The question slipped free without me giving it permission.
Sighing, Pax scrubbed a palm over his brutalized face. “You know that it does.”
I knew that he was right. Or at least that he was speaking the truth of what we had been taught. But there was nothing that could allow me to believe that this man would ever turn on me.
Hurt me.
Not when he was so willing to sacrifice anything.
We fell into a knowing silence that whispered and moaned as I drove through the night.
An uproar still beating in our spirits, the terror still stark, like hounds chasing us down the road. Demons we could never escape.
Neither of us spoke until I saw a sign for a rest stop about an hour and a half outside the town we’d fled.
“We need to get you cleaned up,” I murmured into the tacky stillness.
Pax hesitated for only a second before he gave a tight nod of agreement.
I took the exit, the car passing beneath the double rows of streetlamps that ran on either side of the road. Blips of light pressed in through the windows and flashed over Pax’s wounds like a strobe.
He scanned the area as we pulled into the rest stop’s clearing. It was close to four in the morning, and there were three semitrucks parked side by side in the long spaces reserved for them. Their lights were cut, but their engines still ran through the night.
There was no stopping the flare of panic.
The fear that any one of them might have been sent for me.
And I hated that I might not look at anyone the same ever again. That I might be terrified of any person I encountered for the rest of my life, however short it was going to be.
Pax gritted his teeth, his voice hard but hushed in its encouragement. “They likely pulled in to sleep for the night. There’s little chance we’ll run into them.”
Nodding, I swallowed around the knot in my throat and kept to the right at the fork that led to the parking lot that was reserved for regular vehicles on the far side of the buildings. Relief left me on a breath when I saw there were no other cars parked on that side. I slipped into an angled spot and turned off the engine.
Pax shifted in his seat to rummage around in our bags, his big body filling up the space with that energy only he possessed.
He passed me the shoes he’d bought me yesterday. “Put these on.”