AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I jump when he speaks, his voice seeming overly loud in the tiled bathroom. “Stay. I really don’t want to be alone right now.”
He strips out of his clothes, leaving just his boxers on, and walks me over to the bed. He waits for me to get in before climbing in beside me and tugging me into his arms. “What do you need, Rue?”
“Just you. Just this.” My voice sounds hoarse like I’ve been screaming. I breathe him in and let his heartbeat thaw the icy feeling that’s been wrapped around me since the vision. “I wasn’t him this time,” I whisper when the silence becomes too much.
“What do you mean?”
“In the visions I’ve had, I’ve always seen them through the eyes of the killer. But this time, I was the victim.”
He tenses, his body going rock solid beside mine.
“They didn’t die. I snapped out of it before then. But I can still taste their fear, still smell the sickly scent of his cologne, still feel his fingers on my skin even though, in my vision, I wasalone. I knew something had happened. I knew he’d hurt them.” I gasp because I don’t want to say the words out loud. I don’t want them to be real. If they are, then everything the police thought they knew about this killer is wrong.
“Tell me,” Valen says softly, his hand on my hip, anchoring me to him.
I blow out a deep breath, trying to steady my frayed nerves. “I don’t know who the victim was—whose eyes I was looking through—but they were female. I didn’t see who the attacker was—only a pair of shoes. Men’s boots—maybe work boots of some kind. It was so dark. It was hard to think straight over the fear and panic, but...”
I bury my head against his chest, knowing he can feel my tears as they slicken his skin. “There was pain in her stomach, between her legs,” I whisper. “He raped her.”
Valen yanks me onto his chest and wraps both arms tightly around me. He holds me for the longest time, not saying a word. When I pull back and look at his face, all I see is horror and anguish in his eyes. Not for him, but for me, for reliving someone else’s horrific moments.
“None of the victims were reported to have been raped. Nathan told me that himself. Was he lying? Did they just keep that out of the media? Or worse, are there other victims out there somewhere that we just don’t know about?”
“Was there anything else you can remember? Not the people. Remove them from the scene and tell me about the room. You said you smelled cologne. What else? What could you see? What did you hear?”
Even though it’s the last thing I want to do, I know I have to. I close my eyes and sink back into the memory, trying to look at it as an observer instead.
“It’s cold. There’s a breeze in the room making me shiver.”
“The window is open. Can you hear anything outside?”
I strain my ears, trying to ignore my ragged breathing. “Cars. A horn blares… I can hear music. No. Singing. It’s off-key. Lots of voices but faint, like they’re far away.”
“What are they singing, Rue?”
I start humming the tune, unable to filter out my sobs in the memory enough to hear the words, but Valen recognizes it.
“Auld Lang Syne.”
I lift my head sharply. “New Year’s Eve. The singing is from a bar that must be nearby. I—” I pause when another melody tickles my brain. It wasn’t there before, not until I saw the shoes.
I swallow the bile in my throat. “There’s another tune. Soft, melodic. It starts when the door opens and the shoes appear.” His hand moves up to cup my face as the last part of the puzzle snaps into place. “He came back, and he knocked over a music box. When it hit the floor, it started playing a tune. It’s the same tune from all my visions.”
I fall into a fitful sleep, waking in the throes of a nightmare in which a faceless attacker is pinning me down. I wake up crying in Valen’s arms, only to fall asleep and find myself in another nightmare. When I finally wake up hours later, I’m more exhausted than I was when I fell asleep.
Valen isn’t beside me. I sit up, calming only when I see him sitting at the end of the bed with his head in his hands. It’s a somber picture, his despair filling the room around us.
I must make a noise because he lifts his head to look at me before holding out his arm to me. I scramble into his lap and wrap my legs around him.
“I’m sorry for keeping you awake.”
“Stop apologizing for shit you have no control over. I just wish there was something I could do. I’ve never felt so fucking helpless.”
“You were there every second, holding me tight and keeping me safe. Your hold on me is the only thing keeping me grounded.”
“It’s not enough.”
“It has to be, Valen.”
