Page 31 of The Reveal
I don’t like that at all.
Now that he said it, I can feel my own pulse too, and it feels brash and showy. Like it’s attacking my own palm. Yet somehow, I can also envision his mouth taking the place of my hand, as he presses it over that same insistent throb—
I feel as if the phoenix inked into my skin is throbbing the same way.
He’s closer now. Intensely, impossibly close.
Ruinousnot only makes sense to me now, it feels like an understatement. A comical understatement.
I find myself lost somewhere between his silver eyes and the darkness of his hair. That Spartan profile, his golden skin, and that perfect, beautiful, deliciously cruel mouth.
I am hot and wet. I am shivery all over.
“Winter,” he says, and my name in his mouth makes me clench hard and maybe even whimper, hopefully not out loud. His gaze holds me still. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I was floating off the ground, held tight in his grip. “I brought you here to talk about your brother. Your twin, is that right?”
8.
I feel as if I’ve been forcibly hurled into a vat of ice water. I feel myself shake with the impact, and I jolt back away from him.
The desire inside me doesn’t shift at all, however, and I hate myself for that.
Augie’s medallion is starting to feel more like a brand, disfiguring me where I stand.
“What do you mean?” I demand, my voice a little too close to a yelp. “What happened to my brother? What did you do to him?”
Ariel only watches me with that stillness that I can still feel like a shudder of heat straight through me, like gasoline on a fire when so much of me has gone terribly, horribly cold.
“Do you not know how your brother spends his time?” he asks me, quietly, so quietly, that silver gaze of his moving over me as if he’s looking for clues. Context.
Weakness,I assure myself.He’s looking forweaknessso he can tear you up in more ways than one.
Vampires are famous for the sick games they play.
Because they work.
I never got that before tonight.They work.
I feel a flush of deep shame. It rolls through me, vicious and mean, and I back away from him like that might help. It doesn’t. I stagger a little as I go, and when my calves come up against the line of benches behind me, I sit down. Heavily.
That I’m used to the flavor of this particular shame doesn’t make it any easier or more pliable. That I know it well doesn’t make it sit in me like soft cotton instead of the usual thick, heavy concrete.
It brings back far too many memories, all of them connected to life before the Reveal, which wasn’t exactly the paradise I sometimes like to pretend it was. Maybe there were no monsters like Ariel, but there were monsters all the same.
Heroin. Fentanyl. Meth.
The scumbag dealers who sold it.
The addicts who let those monsters eat them whole.
Just to name a few.
In many ways, my mother’s promises were worse than all of those. Thatthis timeshe learned a lesson. Thatthis timeshe meant it.This time, for sure, she wasdefinitelydone.This timeshe wasabsolutelygetting back on her feet.
I know more than anyone should about how to talk to the thing that’s killing the person you love, right there in their own body. While you watch, helpless.
Just like I know the searing shame of having to talk about it with anyone else.
“I’m sure there are a lot of things about what my brother does that I don’t want to know,” I manage to say, and it feels like my own bones want to shake themselves free of my flesh. “But you’re asking me if I know the broad strokes? Yes. Sadly, I do.”
