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“There’s a moment before the sun breaks over the horizon, when you know it’s coming, the sky has brightened, and the whole world is starting to morph into color for the first time. That tiny point in time when you grasp that it’s no longer gray and darkness swirling around you, but you can distinguish the greens of the forest from the amber tinges to the long grass, and the clouds take on that ethereal kind of pink glow you only see in paintings.”
Fox is staring back at me as I talk, and I don’t know where the words are coming from. She pulls them out of me in a way that feels so natural—like they’ve been sitting waiting for her. Locked away for this very moment between the two of us.
“It’s my favorite time of day. When everything is still, and the forest is first starting to come to life, and there’s so much promise of what might lie ahead after dawn breaks over that horizon.”
I swallow heavily. Fuck it. In our world, you don’t get down on one knee; you don’t define your life by one person and one person only. But Fox is one of my persons. She completes the part of me that has always needed her, in addition to Ven and Thorne.
“I love that time of day.” She breathes. Looking at me with glittering eyes and her plump bottom lip trapped by her teeth. The mad hammering in my chest has me feeling like I could float on out of this car as I sink into the surety of how much I love this girl.
“Ven is my midnight hour. He’s alluring and mysterious and makes me want to play in the shadows. Thorne is like my goddamn sun, and I’ll follow him wherever he goes. You…you are my dawn. My hope for something fucking good. A glimpse of the world when everything is possible.”
Bringing her soft fingertips back up to my mouth, I place a kiss there, while I collect myself. My throat bobs with a heavy swallow.
“That night, you said something to all of us, and it has eaten away at me ever since that you didn’t remember my answer. I wanted you to know—”
“Ky.”
Fox’s face is the flicker of warning, before it happens.
Her eyes grow wide, and there’s a silent alarm hanging on her lips as her mouth drops open. But the fraction of a second in which I see it written all over her face, followed by a blunt force slamming into us. It leaves no time to react.
A shockwave and giant grill of a semi-truck plows into the rear door just behind me at high speed.
Glass shatters everywhere. A violent tearing of metal follows. We spin end over end over end. All I hear is Fox’s screams before she goes silent, and it’s a roar of static and smoke and fumes that clogs my senses.
Something warm slides down the side of my face.
That’s what wakes me up.
How long have I been blacked out for?
The car is a wreckage, and I’m slumped forward, close to the steering wheel. There’s something tightly banded across my ribs, and I can sense movement and noise beside me, but turning in the direction I want to, is proving impossible.
Liquid pain sears all down my right arm side and back.
I need to see my girl.
Have to check if she is ok.
But the effort it takes to form words is too much.
Blackness clouds my vision and swirls across my mind, robbing me of the understanding of how or where or when we are.
And as hands grab me, dragging me from the vehicle, I see the worst thing possible in the seat beside me.
It’s empty.
Fox is gone.
66
One text.
One motherfucking text is all it took to turn my life on its head.
They’ve been taken.
Thorne doesn’t need to say who.
