Page 142 of A Drop of Anguish
My stomach twists, and then he drops onto solid ground with a thud.
“We’re home,” he says so casually, like my life didn’t just flash before my eyes.
My eyelids flutter, and I find myself on Jarron’s patio. We’re back at Shadow Hills, outside his bedroom. I’m not particularly ready to let him go, though.
“Can I set you down?” he murmurs.
“No.” I shake my head against his shoulder.
He chuckles. “All right.”
He carries me inside and shuts the glass door behind him, then he walks me over to his armchair and carefully takes a seat, with me still in his arms.
I curl up against him, head in the crook of his neck. I’ve never felt this willfully helpless, but he feels so comfortable and safe, and I know the moment I let go, reality is waiting for me.
Jarron doesn’t ask me anything else for several minutes. He just holds me and lets me hide away from the whole world with him.
I always hide. I don’t want to hide anymore.
But I’m so scared and overwhelmed.
“Jarron?” I whisper.
“Yes, sunshine?”
I look up quickly to find Jarron back in his human form. I’m not sure when that happened. Anxiety moves in quickly, and I wring my hands before leaping to my feet.
It all comes crashing down, like I knew it would. One moment, I was being held with a knife to my throat, and then there was an explosion and I’m totally fine, being flown out by Jarron.
“What the hell just happened?” I ask.
Jarron’s calm stare digs into me.
“I told you I had a way to get us out of there.”
He had said that. I’d almost forgotten about that. “But not Thompson, Janet, and Lola,” I recall. But they did make it out before us. “Are they back here and safe?”
He nods.
I begin pacing. That explosion… “Did everyone else in the cavern die?” I whip back around to face him. “Is Liz okay?”
“Some of them are likely dead. The jinn transported out, along with anyone who was near her. Mr. Vandozer being one of them.”
I grimace. Mr. Vandozer got out? Anyone else around who wasn’t able to snap their fingers and disappear in an instant would have died. Except me. Why? He had some secret way of protecting me?
A demon cannot harm his chosen.
I don’t know that I’m ready to believe that just yet. Except, I really can’t come up with another explanation.
I breathe in and out three times, then I blurt out the question plaguing me. “Did you imprint on Liz at Myre Island?”
Some tension returns to his body.
“Or did you imprint on me?”
After everything that happened underground, I can’t imagine how any of this makes sense unless it was me all along, but even that doesn’t make sense. How could they all have gotten it wrong?
But then, Jarron always seemed so sure.You were never a second choice.
