Page 28 of Snag
“Yes,” he says, not looking at me.
I stand up, abruptly enough that the chair goes spinning away on its wheels behind me, smashing into the bookshelves. Rath flinches, dropping a hand to the ground to steady himself.
“You knew me!” I shout down at him.
“Yes,” he says, steady and sure but still not meeting my eyes.
“You knew me …” I sob. But only once. I’m still so angry I can’t seem to move past this point, this moment.
He slowly stands, hands clenched into fists at his sides. “I knew you.”
“When I heard your voice … on the phone … with Precious in the car …” I shake my head in disbelief. “You felt … you felt …”
“I felt what?” His tone is soft, verging on gentle.
Utterly irrationally, that pisses me off. “Fuck you, Rath,” I snarl, slamming my open palm to his chest, right over where I suspect he has an anatomical heart inked into his skin. An identical anatomical heart that we four all had tattooed, and which I lost …
I lost the fucking heart when I died.
Rath takes a step back from me, from my vitriol.
“Fuck you, Rath. Fuck you for hearing me on that fucking phone. For seeing me in the motel, for coming here to my house, and fucking pretending you didn’t know me.”
“You didn’t know me, Zaya!” Rath shouts, jabbing a finger toward the window. “You were fucking dead. I watched you get your fucking neck snapped! I heard it … I heard it … and felt it slash through my fucking chest as if it … sundered my fucking soul.”
Slightly thrown by that revelation — the specifics of how I died, even with no mention of who was responsible — my hand flies to my throat.
“I barely fucking survived without you!” Rath’s chest heaves, visibly pained. “And you didn’t fucking know me. You didn’t know me, Zaya.”
I try to hold onto my anger, to shore myself up against the pain, the agony evident in his recollection. None of that is an actual legitimate reason for his behavior the past few days. “So you thought playing games with me —”
“It wasn’t a game.” Rath tries to calm his tone. “It was never a game —”
“There are no threads between us,” I say, quiet but resolute. “How was I supposed to know I didn’t remember you?”
“I … I don’t know … I don’t understand what you mean by —”
“You have your memories,” I insist. “You knew me.”
He takes a shaky breath. “Yes. I knew you. I know … I know you liked to read … mysteries mostly … we’d meet in the treehouse, and you’d … we’d …” He scrubs another hand over his head. “What does it matter now, Zaya?”
“It doesn’t,” I say hollowly. “It didn’t matter. It obviously never mattered.”
“What the fuck are you saying?”
I look him in the eyes then, having to seriously tilt my head to do so. This uber powerful, dreadfully sexy male who was supposed to be mine. Maybe was mine. For a little while. “I … I’m saying that if you were truly meant to be … if you knew you were mine, that I was yours … that we were soul bound …”
“Then what?” he growls, amber edging his hazel eyes now.
“Just that. It obviously never mattered to you, or you never would have pretended you didn’t know me.”
He rears back. “You don’t fucking know me —”
“Exactly.”
He stands there, just staring at me with thoughts obviously whirling through his mind. And the longer we look at each other, the more the numbness starts creeping around all my edges again.
Forcing myself to look elsewhere, I cast my gaze over the books on the desk, on Muta watching us intently with his body tightly curled and head raised alertly. I settle my attention on the photograph I’ve set on the windowsill.
