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Hung on her watery gaze, I say, “I won’t lose you.”
“Then don’t lose me.” Fear brims her delicate features.
There’s an undercurrent of threat there, and I can taste her heartbreak as she delivers that threat. It stings my lungs, the sweetest, aching pain as I breathe her in.
“The man who supports his madness with murder is a fanatic,” she quotes Voltaire, trying to seduce me with her reason. Then she places her hand on my arm, an urgent appeal to release the man in my clutch.
“The lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.” Homer’s words cleaved from my soul. “You are my madness, Halen. I am maddeningly, fanatically in love with you.”
“Kallum…” Her voice cracks, a tear falls free, and I see it in a matter of a blink, all that is being torn away, all that is being lost.
A dangerous man is a mad one with nothing to lose.
“You’ve always known who I am,” I tell her. “You just prefer the illusion.” I choke up on his head. “Sometimes, we just need the sharp snap of clarity to awaken us.”
I keep her teary gaze trapped in mine, then deliver one hard, fast twist.
The bone-snappingcrunchof his neck breaking echos through the chasm before his body falls slack to the earth.
Halen’s emotions clash in a vortex stronger than any storm, and I lick the saccharine remnants from the air, tasting her, whetting my appetite.
“You killed him,” she says, shock infusing her breathy words.
“If you didn’t want him dead, then you wouldn’t have said so much that he couldn’t know.”
I cast a glance down at his unmoving body. I should’ve torn his spine from his neck to really send a fucking message.
Hewantsher—and I’m making damn sure he knows I won’t let that happen.
She tears the plastic evidence sleeve off the knife and points the blade at me, and my blood is fire. “This is what you want. Madness, mayhem. Chaos?—”
“Those are listed on my résumé.” I step over the body as I pry my necktie loose.
Homer understood the struggle in having a muse. Once invoked, our muse is free to use her vessel however she pleases, and we are but empty and fallow as we wait to be inspired, unable to even take a breath until graced by her divine beauty.
Halen retreats another step, her foot placement slipping farther down the steep incline. “Kallum, please. I have to get help. You can’t come with me.” She looks pointedly at the ankle monitor.
“Fuck, you really do lie so pretty.”
Dr. Keller is long gone, hauled ass to the next town by now.
Hernandez is injured, maybe even dead.
The backup feds are still another five minutes away, if they were even called.
With a deep grunt, I kneel and snap the pin on the GPS monitor wrapping my ankle. The strap falls loose, and I fling the tracking device out across the ridge.
As I rise to my feet, I lock Halen in my predatory gaze. “If you run from me this time, sweetness, you better run fast.”
The rush of her fear nearly levels me.
Every twin flame gives chase at some point, and my muse doesn’t disappoint.
She runs.
I roll my sleeves up my forearms and trace my fingers over the sigil branding my flesh, then ritually spin the ring around my thumb, giving little Halen a head start before I pursue. I’ve been chasing her for a long, long time.
It’s about fucking time I catch her.
