Page 35 of Souls and Sorrows

He strokes my bottom lip, and I suck in air, tasting the mint of his toothpaste.

Ready for more.

But instead of feeling his mouth crash to mine, he rips the flowers from my fist, tossing them onto the floor beyond us. Startled, my eyes fly open, wide and uncertain. His hand slams down over my lips, the pressure so harsh that my teeth cut into the flesh there, flooding my mouth with the taste of copper.

Our position traps one arm at my side, and I jerk back, trying to get away.

My expression hardens, matching the intensity of his.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he rasps, grabbing my hand and wrenching it into view.

The valley of skin between my thumb and index finger is red and patchy with almost-translucent pockets bubbling on the surface.

What the hell?

“Poison is cute,” Cash says without removing himself from me. “Unoriginal but cute. I’ll admit though, I expected more from you, my little nightmare.”

The nickname, sudden and unfounded, makes me bristle.

He doesn’t let me free to speak, but I try anyway because I’m as confused as he is. “I didn’t—”

“Shh,” he coos, and now, my nerves are firing on all cylinders for entirely different reasons.

Alarm trickles into my being, and I pull back, trying to dislodge myself from his grip again.

“Don’t stop to smell the roses,” Papà said.

I didn’t realize he’d meant it literally.

10

Ariana sitson the edge of the hospital exam table, swinging her legs back and forth while a nurse takes her vitals. The swelling in her face has gone down considerably since we left St. Leonard’s, though her hands, where direct contact with the oleander was, are still a vicious red and blistered all over.

She looks wildly uncomfortable. Since our arrival at the ER, she’s been incapable of sitting still for more than a few seconds, rubbing her fingernails together and looking everywhere but at me.

Guilt, if I’ve ever seen it.

“Hold still and take several slow, deep breaths,” the nurse says, donning a stethoscope and pressing the diaphragm against her abdomen. “You’re sure you didn’t ingest any of the flowers?Everypart of oleander is toxic, you know—the stems, the petals, even the sap.”

My little nightmare shakes her head, and a piece of hair falls from where she tucked it behind her ear. “I only touched it.”

The lace material of her dress scratches against the paper on the table as she shifts, leaning forward so the nurse can switch to her back. Our gazes lock with the change, and I study the planes of her face, committing the angles to memory so I can come back and analyze them later.

Lawyers are trained to read people. It helps when it comes to choosing jurors and can be the deciding factor when picking a defensive strategy.

Right now, my instincts are telling me to sweat her out. Ariana’s wound so tight that I don’t think it’ll take very much to wring a confession from her pretty little lips.

My eyes dip, sweeping over her plush mouth. Regret swims through my veins as I wish I’d gotten the chance to kiss her back at the church, if for nothing else than just to say I’d done it.

But one taste wouldn’t have been enough, and I would have compromised my position just to keep her looking at me like she wanted to swallow me whole.

I don’t think I’d mind if she did, and that’s a very big problem.

A nightmare of epic proportions—and not the kind that simply jars you from a light slumber. Ariana’s the kind that yanks you from a deep sleep with sharp talons, and then you spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, afraid of its return.

“Well, I’ll leave the official diagnosis to the doctor,” the nurse says, standing up and pocketing her equipment. She turns to look at me, as if I were the one with the ailment. “But your lungs sound great, Mrs. Primrose.”

Mrs. Primrose.Satisfaction pulses in my chest, and I meet Ariana’s glassy gaze with a smirk.

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