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I should never have bound my wound.
I shouldn’t have waited.
“Lucien?” The whisper of his name falls from my lips on a sob.
My husband is on the ground, and all it takes is one look at his still form to know he’s dead. I know, just as I knew I was with child long before my cycle refused to come. How I knew so many things that I wished I didn’t.
“Lucien?”
His cool blue eyes fail to move. They simply stare at the rapidly darkening sky, his body still and cold.
Lucien’s not breathing, and Rhys is just standing there bleeding, holding the blade he used to kill my husband. Holding that same blasted knife that I saw in my vision.
No. No. No.
I haven’t a clue as to what made me do it. And looking back, it’s still a mystery to me as to how the blade moved from Rhys’ loose grip and into my hand, or how exactly I knew where to pierce his flesh to hurt him the most.
Driving the blade home in his flesh, blood instantly pours from my own belly, down my bodice, and through my skirt. Shock and bitter anguish tears through me as realization dawns.
I knew then that when my arm had been sliced, it had actually been Rhys who had gotten cut first—it had been Rhys who had bled first.
I stabbed him, but we both bled.
Bound, my mind screams. We are bound.
Then the contractions start.
And I will forever blame Rhys for two deaths that day.
Chapter One
AURELIA
It starts just like they always do, from the blackness of a sleep so deep, the fabric of what is real and what is dream weaves together to make what would be.
An entryway or vestibule, the room seemed small. A little girl had opened the door, a lovely walnut wood, inlaid with a stained-glass window. The mother’s heels clicked against the cream-colored marble floor with an urgent gait as she hurried toward her daughter, her pink skirt suit swishing against her legs as she fiddled with the simple strand of understated pearls at her neck.
“I thought I told you not to?—”
The girl’s white-blonde hair practically gleamed against her skin as her mouth formed an “O” of surprise. She was young, maybe six or seven, and deeply tan, as only children could be with their terminable immunity to the heat and sun.
Moving behind the girl, the shock on the mother’s face morphed into fear so quickly her features seemed to warp, like a piece of untreated wood that had been left to the elements to rot.
She gripped her daughter’s shoulders, shaking her violently in an attempt to get the poor girl to move, to back away from the looming shadow. Clearly male, the figure was backlit by the rising sun. The woman recognized the man, however. She didn’t need to see his face to know what danger lay before them—she could easily see the large caliber handgun gripped in his meaty palm.
Shrieking for her daughter to run, the mother roughly tugged the poor girl behind her back. But her daughter was either in shock or too scared to move because she stayed rooted to the spot, clutching the hem of her mother’s designer suit.
Slowly, calmly, the man raised his gun as if he had all the time in the world to take his shot. The muzzle fired once, and a tiny hole appeared in the woman’s chest. A small trickle of blood bloomed over the heart of her blouse. She went down slowly, dropping first to her knees, sliding to her bottom, and then to her side. Even in death, she was careful not to fall on her child. Again, the muzzle fired, and this time, the daughter collapsed, her wound considerably less pretty, given the caliber of the gun and her small size.
And in that tiny little vestibule, in what was surely a beautiful home of a nice family, the mother and daughter were left to cool in their drying lifeblood.
I should wake up screaming, but I don’t. After these many years, dreaming night after night of the horrors people inflict on one another, I stopped screaming several decades ago. As per usual, though, I sit bolt upright in my bed, sheets tangled around my legs, damp with cold sweat.
My best friend Evan would call me a psychic, but I tell her on the regular she’s full of shit. Psychics know things before they happen, and I do. On occasion.
But not enough for me to actually make a difference.
Not enough to save the people who need saving.
