Page 150 of Bound By Fury

But I’m not stupid. The hunters have planned to lure me into a trap during the Centennial Night of Remembrance. Malachi and Alastair and whoever else they’re working with.

These are my enemies. Not Gigi. Not the universe. Not myself.

Malachi is the reason I can’t grieve. The longer I sit with it, the more I realize that he represents everything wrong with the world. He has been created in the image of the men bred to prey on the Zodiac Witches.

So, like every single one of the cloaks who will fall after him, he must die.

I’m sitting at the small table tucked into the kitchen nook, staring at the screen of my phone.

I haven’t received a single call or message since I left my friends standing in my dorm room.

I guess I was successful in protecting them from all this. In pushing them away. It looks like the fight in my room was all it took to sever every connection I made on that godforsaken campus.

But that’s okay.

It’s for the best.

I’m sending a text to my mom, some lie about not feeling well, when two sets of messages come in back to back.

Sparks crawl up my spine as my eyes skim over the words.

DM from k!ller_kai:

Heard you finally left

Good

Now run as far as you can and never come back

Pine Grove won’t be far enough

How long has he known about this? About me? Did he know every summer as we lay beneath the shade of the sycamore, as we tramped through the stream, as we swiped handfuls of sticky sweets from the buckets in Bailey’s Candy Emporium?

Did he know during our fight last year, his lip split from his father’s fist?

It occurs to me that perhaps everything he’s said to me since I stepped foot back in Earnest has been true. I’m not safe here. I awoke a shadowed beast in him, turned him into a monster. He hates me.

And yet at every turn, he’s begged me to leave.

What’s worse than the boy you once loved being destined to kill you?

When he can’t make up his mind whether he wants to.

Whatever.

None of it matters.

Not anymore.

Dead men can’t lie to you. They can’t pity you. They can’t lure you to your demise.

They can’t balance your fate on their fingertips, they can’t succumb to their basest instincts, they can’t kiss you goodbye.

The second set of messages makes my eyebrows crinkle in the middle. A piece of the puzzle I still haven’t quite placed.

Lucas Matsoukas:

Where are you?