“Yes.”
“And she hasn’t killed anyone yet?”
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
“So there’s still time to find her and stop her.”
“There’s no stopping them,” I answer.
“Have you tried?”
I can’t meet his eyes. “No. It’s pointless to try.” I think about my encounter with Gigi in the boathouse. I had thought—foolishly—maybe I could talk to her, therealher. Aurora. Maybe some part of her was still human, still had a beating heart that would be tired of the killing. But Lon interrupted us. And I sense she’s too far gone anyway. My words would never be enough.
Bo drops his palm from the back of his neck. And I can see in his eyes that he’s starting to believe me. “Fuck, Penny,” he says, standing up and taking a step toward me. “So Lon and Davis were right? They do have a Swan sister locked in that boathouse?”
I nod.
“And Olivia... or Marguerite—whatever her name is—is trying to kill me?”
“She’s already slipped into your mind. She can make you see things that aren’t there, feel things that aren’t real.”
“When I saw her,” he says, “in the water... waiting for me. It felt like I needed her, like I’d die if I didn’t get to her. Like...” He swallows back the words, choking on them.
“Like you loved her?” I finish for him.
“Yeah.” His eyes find mine.
“She can convince you that you’ve never loved anyone quite so much or ever will again.”
He clenches his fists together at his sides and I watch the motion, his forearms flexing, his temples pulsing.
“And then you were there,” he says, recounting the moment when I jumped into the ocean after him. “I could hear you but I couldn’t focus on you. You seemed so far away. But then I felt your hands. You were right in front of me.” He looks up, the darkest centers of his eyes like the darkest depths of the ocean. “And then you kissed me.”
“I...” My voice feels strangled in my throat. “I had to stop you.”
A beat of silence. My heart stumbles, catches, restarts again.
“After that,” he says, “I didn’t feel her calling me anymore. I still don’t.”
“Maybe we broke her hold on you,” I say, my voice feeling small.
“Youbroke her hold on me.”
Words tangle up on my tongue. All the things I want to say. “I needed to bring you back. I couldn’t let you go; I couldn’t lose you. I couldn’t let...” The weight of my honesty rattles the very center of my ribs, my stomach, the place just behind my eyes. “I couldn’t let her have you.”
I don’t allow myself to look away from him—I need him to speak, to wash over my words with his own. In his eyes, a storm waits at the edges. His hand lifts, and his fingers slide up the ridge of my cheekbone and behind my ear. The sensation of his fingertips against my skin unweaves the stone knitted together at the base of my heart. I close my eyes briefly then open them again, a craving rising up inside me, pure and uncorrupt. He pulls me forward, and I pause only a feather’s width from his mouth. I look into his eyes, trying to root myself in the moment. And then he kisses me like he needs me to root him here too.
His lips are warm and his fingertips cold. All at once I am wrapped up in him: his heart battering just beneath his chest, his hands in my hair, his mouth searching my lower lip. He is everywhere, filling my lungs and the space between each breath. And I feel myself falling, tumbling like a star dropping from the sky and spinning toward Earth. My heart stretches outward, becomes light and jittery.
This moment—this boy—could tear me apart and upend everything. But in the heat of the cottage, wind rattling the glass in the windows, rain pelting the roof, with our skin flecked with salt water, I don’t care. I let his hands roam my chilled flesh and my fingers weave up the back of his neck. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I only want him.Him.
Love is an enchantress—devious and wild.
It sneaks up behind you, soft and gentle and quiet, just before it slits your throat.
***
I wake on the hardwood floor beside the fireplace, Bo asleep next to me, his arm folded over my hip bone. He is breathing softly against my hair. My eyes skirt across the living room, remembering where I am: his cottage. The fire has turned to coals, all the logs burned down, so I shimmy from beneath his arm—his fingers twitching—and slide a fresh log into the fireplace, pushing it through the coals. It takes only a moment for the flames to reignite.
