Page 120 of My Revenant
THE ECHO OF HIM.
I woke with a gasp. I could have sworn I heard something—a banging in the darkness. I sat up in bed, my pulse thundering. Except it wasn’t dark. At least, it wasn’t as dark as it should have been. Through the gap in the curtains, a flickering red and blue light poured into the motel room.Red and blue.
The police.
They’d found me.
They had fucking found me.
All this time on the run and it was for nothing. They were here. It was over.
“Harper!” I whispered, turning to his bed as flashing red and blue illuminated his unmoving silhouette. “Harper!” I dared to call a little louder.
Bang bang bang bang bang
The air in my lungs formed a ball, expanding, too big to fit inside me. Bigger. Bigger. Bigger. My rib cage constricted. Crushing inwards. The core of me imploded and exploded simultaneously. “H-Harper,” I gasped, my trembling hands ripping back the blankets. My knees betrayed me as I tumbled to the floor.
“Hmmm?” Half-mumbled acknowledgment.
“Harper,” I choked out, more sobbed than spoken.
Bang bang bang bang
“What?” he mumbled, and I wondered how the fuck anyone could sleep through that noise. The sound of the knocking echoed so loud the walls might as well have been shaking.
“P-police.”
“What?”
“Police,” I repeated, the word spoken like a curse.
He rolled over to face me, pale eyes opening, looking to me first then the lights pouring in through the windows. Red and blue lit up the sharp angles of his features, casting looming shadows in the room beyond him. Shadows that twisted and taunted, beckoning me to a darkness out of my reach.
“What the—”
Bang bang bang bang
His question was cut off by an avalanche of sound, my heart beating back just as loud in response, the walls of my chest threatening to crack and crumble from the force of it. That ball inside me expanded further until it cut off my airways completely, and I couldn’t breathe. They’d found me. They knew what I’d done. It was over.
Pale brows furrowed in concern. His blankets were pulled back, and bare feet touched the carpet as he stood. No! He couldn’t go out there. He couldn’t let them in.
I grabbed at him as he attempted to pass me.
“No.”
Bang bang bang bang
Harper crouched down until his eye level matched mine. I sought the mirror of my panic in his eyes and was left wanting. His were calm. Pale and solid like steel, like an anchor. “Listen to me.” He spoke, and his voice was firm. Solid. Reliable. “You’re going to let me go, and I’m going to go look at what’s going on, and nothing bad is going to happen.”
“Youdon’t—”
“Nothingbad is going to happen.”
He didn’t know that. He couldn’t. But he spoke like he did. Like there was not a doubt in his mind. So certain. I wanted to believe him.
My hand slipped away, releasing the death grip I had on his shirt, and he stood again. Walking to the entrance. To my damnation.
The lights grew brighter as he parted the curtains. A flood of red and blue. Colors that seared my retinas. A torch to illuminate the ghosts in the haunted house of my soul. Then the lights dimmed as the curtain shifted back into place.
