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I hate the forlorn look on Lily’s face. It destroys something vital inside of me, a piece as crucial to my survival as my lungs and heart are.
“I promise you, I haven’t been stalking you. I never once tried to find you after we left, but I had to look into you once I realized you were the Shadow.” I find that I can’t speak above a whisper. There’s something so breakable about the silence, so fragile. Anything louder threatens to tear everything into finite pieces. “I found the articles about your parents’ murder, but they didn’t give a lot of information. So I hacked into the police records and—”
“Did they tell you that I found the bodies?” Her voice is hollow—a decaying carcass collecting maggots, abandoned on the side of the road. The noise is like a needle being plunged directly into my lungs. “Did the police records tell you that?”
“I don’t—”
“They weren’t just killed,” she continues in that deadened, emotionless voice. “They weretortured. Ripped apart. Slaughtered. Used for some fucked-up sacrificial ritual I still know nothing about.”
“You—”
“And you guys left me that same night.” A single tear paves its way down her cheek.
Grief claws at me, sinking its talons in deeply and leaving behind jagged, bloody scratches that I fear will never heal. I wantto cry with her and share in her pain, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to. Not after what I did.
Not after I abandoned her.
“We didn’t know—”
“I was all alone.” Another tear joins the first, but she still doesn’t look my way, keeping her gaze fixed on the wall in front of her.
My stomach spasms, threatening to empty itself on the floor. I swear her pain pries apart a piece of my soul.
Why did we leave her?
Why didn’t we stay and make sure she was okay?
Why?
Why?
Why?
“Lily, I’m so damn sorry—” My chest constricts painfully.
“And by your own admission, you haven’t spared a single thought for me in all these years. And then you come back, look into my past, dig up the worst moment of my life…” Anger infuses each and every word, and that familiar fire I’ve come to associate with Lily Dean flares to life in her eyes.
She has one of Brooks’s T-shirts balled in her hands. Her fury stabs at my brain like a flaming blade.
“I’m sorry…” The whole world seems to fade, and my breathing is nothing but a ragged sound, distant through the thrumming of blood in my ears.
I didn’t know what I expected when I looked into Lily’s past, but it wasn’t supposed to be… It wasn’t supposed to bethis.
It wasn’t supposed to be images so gruesome that they’ll haunt me until the day I die. It wasn’t supposed to be the knowledge that the girl I love with all of my heart was the one to find the bodies of her own damn parents. It wasn’t supposed to be a pain so visceral it’s on the verge of slashing me to ribbons.
I wondered what could’ve happened in Lily’s past to make her so angry and jaded, all rough edges and sharp knives. I wrongly assumed it was because we left her shortly after she discovered the supernatural world existed.
Maybe that had a part to play in it, but it wasn’t everything.
God, I wish it was, though.
Lily Dean would’ve been able to survive our departure. She’s a fighter through and through. What she can’t come back from, however, is the death of her two beloved parents.
We left her to save her from this world. Instead, we forced her to endure the worst of it alone.
“You all left me when I needed you most.” Fury pounds off of Lily in an almost palpable wave. It’s a dark and caustic type of emotion that makes me want to both cower and pull her into my arms at the same time. “Youabandoned me.”
I want to explain the reasoning for our decision. I want to express my condolences, but words seem superficial at the moment.
