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“He has someone I love,” she finally chokes. This…this isn’t personal.”
“I beg to differ.”
She shivers, her eyes pleading. “It’s not. But…I have to. Ihave to, or he’s going to kill—”
“Your brother?”
She stiffens.
“Please—”
“This person wants you to kill me, or he’s going to kill Finn? Is that what he said?”
An anguished cry sobs from her throat as tears well in her eyes.
“You don’t understand.I would doanythingto save him.”
My mind glitches. Memories come bobbing to the surface with a snarling vengeance.
I’m sixteen. There’s still blood on my shirt from taking her to the hospital when I get home and find the kitchen door ajar.
When I find my mother limp and motionless on the ground, withhimstanding over her. When he turns to me, and fuckingshrugs.
“What are you going to do about it, you little freak?”
Anything. Anything and everything. That’s what I’d do to save my family.
I push the memory down and stare into Una’s tear-streaked face, feeling the tip of her knife piercing my neck—feeling the drops of blood dripping down my skin as our eyes lock.
I sensed it before—our shared darkness. Our mutual appreciation for the edge, and for looking over it into the abyss to see what’s down there. To see if that would make us normal.
But now I see, we’re not just similar monsters.
We’re the same.
Time slows, my pulse beating in time with hers, as if we’re connected by the steel in her hand piercing my skin. And I see with utter clarity that she would do, and has done,anythingfor the family she loves.
If I had a heart, it might break a little right now from what I have to tell her.
“You don’t have to do this,” I growl quietly.
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Una. Finn is dead.”
She looks like I just punched her in the gut. Her face crumples. The light inside her switches off. The knife quivers against my throat, leaking blood down, soaking the collar of my shirt.
Then her eyes narrow.
“That’s a fucking lie—”
“Heroin.”
She chokes.
“He overdosed. Eighteen months ago.”
Una starts to cry, her shoulders shaking as she moves her head side to side.
