Page 88 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
“My mother came home. She found us. She found him, on top of me in my bed. She went and got my father’s gun from the nightstand and told my brother to leave the room and then she pointed the gun at me and called me a little whore, and she pulled the trigger. She shot me three times in the stomach. And then she turned the gun on herself.”
Her voice was totally devoid of emotion. Dead. Hawk’s arms were around her, crushing tight. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see through the water in his eyes.
“She was in a coma for three months before she died. My brother went to prison; my father made sure of that. And I lived. If you could call it that. I survived. I became best friends with shame, and I grew to understand how fear never lets you go once it’s sunk its hooks in you. Fear becomes a part of you, like a tumor that can never be cut out.”
Hawk felt like he was drowning. He felt as if all the gravity in the universe had centered on a place in the middle of his chest.
“Garrett kept trying to kill himself in prison, so eventually they moved him to a psychiatric facility. He’s still there. Still keeps trying to kill himself. Still calls my father every year on my birthday, asking if I’ve forgiven him yet.”
There was a long, terrible silence. Hawk was trembling with horror, thinking of her face when she’d told him she could only look back on their first night together as another betrayal. He whispered her name.
In a quiet voice, she said, “You’re the only one I’ve ever told that story. My girlfriend Nola knows part of it. And my father knows, of course. But other than that . . . you’re the only one.”
Hawk rolled her over and took her face in his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His voice shook.
She wiped away the moisture at the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t tell you so you could feel sorry for me. I told you because I want you to know that all the broken things inside me feel less broken when I look at you.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Now, you mean. Because of what I gave you. Because of the drugs. When they wear off—”
“If it means I’ll feel differently than I do right now, I hope they never wear off. I’ve never felt this happy. This free. I want to feel like this forever.”
Her smile was lovely and warm, but he saw the haze, the faint fog of the spirit vine dulling the normally crystalline sheen of her eyes.
A mad, mad idea seized him.
She could feel like this forever. He couldn’t make the past go away, but he could take away its power to hurt her.
All he had to do was ask kalum to show him how to make the spirit vine brew.
He buried his face in her neck, hiding, shaking with the awful realization that he’d never wanted anything so much in his entire life.
And what kind of man did that make him, that he wanted to basically keep her enslaved, her free will devoured by psychoactive drugs that made her happy and malleable and . . . and . . .
Mine.
It came from some primeval place inside him, an ancient beast calling out, roused by the scent of blood. It began to whisper to him, coercive and sly.
There’s nothing for you here, in this colony where you’re only the Misbegotten, the lone wolf who lives like a hermit, misunderstood and unwanted except for the occasional, impersonal, tryst. Why shouldn’t you take what you want? Why shouldn’t you have a taste of happiness, after all these years of living in the dark? Why shouldn’t you both? You can heal her. You can heal yourself.
Take her. Take her and run.
Hawk’s shaking grew worse.
Jacqueline felt it. She wound her arms around his neck. “It’s all right,” she whispered into his ear as he crushed her against him. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’ll be all right. You’ll see. No matter what happens, I promise everything is going to be all right. It has to be. Because I don’t think anything else could ever compare to this.”
She squeezed him when she said the word, “this,” and in that moment, Hawk knew she was right.
And he knew exactly what he was going to do next.
He pressed a kiss to her forehead, smoothed her hair away from her face. She settled against him, warm and perfect, and within seconds fell asleep.
Hawk held her as the sun rose higher in the sky, held her as the minutes turned to hours and his mind spun with plans and possibilities. Then he rose from the bed as quietly as he could so as not to wake her, and slipped out of the room.
Olivia Sutherland was having a nightmare.
She was a strong woman, not prone to fear or flights of fancy, but ever since she and the rest of the final families had left Sommerley and begun the journey to the rainforest, she felt as if a malevolent specter had been lurking silently behind her, following every footstep, its bony hands reaching out for the back of her neck.
The feeling worsened the deeper they’d gone into the jungle. They were led by an eerily silent Leander and the colony guide. Tonight after she’d breastfed her own child and the Queen’s twins and they’d been tucked into their snug pouches, she’d lain in a makeshift bed of bracken and leaves beside her snoring husband, staring up at the black tangle of branches above, feeling her skin crawl as if a cluster of tarantulas were using her body for a mating ground.
