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What a bastard.
What a lowlife fucking bastard.
If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him all over again.
For a few weeks, while I’d waited in prison to find out what sins I’d be charged with after my arrest the night I’d shot him, I’d actually felt guilty. My fractured mind tried to lay the blame squarely at my feet. That I’d misread his intentions. That he truly did love me. That he wasn’t toxic or manipulative or dangerous.
But now, I saw the truth.
The only truth.
He was the worst creature alive because he could use truth and twist it into lies. He could use love and make it hurt worse than any weapon.
He deserved to die.
She hunched and rubbed her arms. “I spoke to him. Every year.”
“I know. He told me.”
She reared back. “He did?” Anger lit her crystal-blue eyes. “That asshole told me every year that you were dead. I screamed at him that I didn’t believe it. I never believed it. My heart knew. My heart knew all along that you weren’t gone.” She rubbed at her chest. “It acted so strange, Aslan. I even went to a doctor to be checked out because I’d wake up with palpitations and suffer at such random times. But the cardiologist assured me I was fine, so I just assumed it was symptoms of a broken heart.”
I lowered the photograph, trembling. “Y-You felt that?” My eyes suddenly locked on the other item on her bedside. A tiny keepsake from the deep that’d been my good luck charm before I lost it.
Snatching the spiny, peach-and-cream shell, tears clawed up my throat.
She kept it.
She—
“I spoke to you every night,” she whispered wetly. Coming toward me, she rested her hand over mine as I clutched the gift she’d given me all those years ago. “Every night I felt my heart skip and double-beat, I begged you to feel me. Each time my chest pounded with an irregular rhythm, I rubbed that damn shell, begging to know if you were alright.”
“Fuck, canim.” I raised her hand and kissed her knuckles.
I should be used to her by now. It shouldn’t shock me that her heart had scrambled like mine. That the fraught pain and terror I’d endured had transmitted through whatever connection we shared.
This incredible, sensitive girl.
My all-knowing, intuitive soulmate.
She stood there in her yellow bikini, with all her beauty on display, and I fell to the bottom of my affection.
I’d never loved her more.
“I heard you, Neri,” I breathed. “I just wish...I wish you hadn’t heard me too.”
She stilled. “What...what did he do to you?”
I shrugged sadly. “You felt it. Your heart felt everything.”
“You’re saying...” Her eyes widened. “You’re saying you had the same palpitations? The same discomfort?”
“I’m saying—”
“Wait.” She pushed me out of the way and opened her bedside drawer. “I noted the time and duration of each episode.” Ripping out a spiral-ringed notebook, she trembled. “What if they match? What if—”
“Neri.” I pressed my hand over the book before she could open it.
I had no doubt that if we were to take the times of her palpitations and convert them to Turkey’s time zone, they would line up directly with the moments I was strapped in the chair.
