Page 133 of Lies Like Love

Mom resented Jude for trying to save me when she couldn’t break her chains. The men in her life used her to the point where she believed it’s all she deserved. Hopelessness strong enough to eat a person from the inside out.

While they pulled her strings, she became a shell. Fighting back too late, and her soul paying the price.

When I was on the brink of drowning—nails raking my father’s face and water baptizing me from the inside out—I understood them all.

Which is why, as I step past my father’s lifeless body, I don’t so much as flinch or look down. The man I thought he was died when I was young, and I refuse to mourn the person he became.

Jude leads me out of the bathroom, and I pause as we pass his bed.

His room looks exactly the same as it did when we were younger. Royal blue wallpaper and silver finishes. The one place that always felt like him, even when he didn’t.

“Fel.” Jude turns, capturing my cheeks with his hands. Blood smears my jaw, and it’s what we are—death, sacrifice, an inevitable end.

I should mind the sticky way his fingers drag my skin. But unlike when we stood here eleven years ago, there’s no pain in the lives we’ve lost, only freedom. Jude has no limits when it comes to me, and I finally accept it.

It might make me sick like him—or like them. But the blood on both of us had to be spilled.

Jude grazes his thumb over the apple of my cheek, and I’m lost in his green eyes as they search mine for answers.

“Are you okay?”

“To the end.” It’s almost a whisper, but I’ve never understood the words more than this moment.

Jude leans down and brushes my lips with his. “To the end.”

He presses his mouth to mine and my heart beats again. Life only his kiss can shock through my system. I grip the front of his T-shirt with my wet hands and pull him closer, parting my lips to hand him all I have left.

Butterflies and tongues fluttering as we find each other in this madness.

I’ve loved Jude as long as I’ve hated him. And I needed him through all of it.

Jude pulls back, and I seal my lips with the taste of his kiss.

“Is this it then? Is it finally over?”

“No.” He reaches for my hand and grazes his thumb over the back of it, pausing on the ring on my finger. “Just the beginning.”

I’ve never needed a beginning as much as I do right now. To start over, and to leave this all behind me.

Jude’s face winces and his shoulders slump ever so slightly as my hand grazes his side. And like I’ve forgotten, realization floods back.My dad shot him.

“We need to get you to the hospital.” I place my hand over the bullet wound and he winces.

“Forgot about that.”

“How do you forget about a bullet wound?” It’s seeping blood, and I’m not sure how he’s even standing.

Jude tips my chin up to face him. “I forget myself for you.”

I shake my head because I don’t want him to do that. But there’s no stopping it either. Because I forget myself with him as well. His green opal eyes with their drop of blue that feels like the piece of me he took for himself and has kept safe ever since.

Jude drops his hand and sits on the bed, color draining from his face. “Maybe I do need that doctor.”

He lays back, and I reach into his pocket for his phone. My fingers shaking as I dial. I’m not sure how to explain the bodies or what happened here, but I can’t let him die worrying about it.

I give them the address before hanging up, and Jude tugs my hand, pulling me onto the bed next to him.

“Lay with me,” he says quietly.

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