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I must have slept, between all my bouts of worrying, because nightmares pressed in on me. When I woke, I was disoriented, thinking I was back in that motel room that I had shared with Brennan. Panic gripped my heart.
“Amelia!” Rose’s voice cracked desperately. She sounded distraught, and instantly my own fears dropped away.
I checked Dylan again, then grabbed my sweatshirt and bundled my sister out the door, closing the hotel door behind us so we could speak in the light of the hallway, where we wouldn’t wake Dylan and Aiden. I pulled the soft gray fabric that still smelled of woodsmoke over my head quickly.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her, seeing how her face was wet with tears.
“You keep crying out for Brennan.” Her voice shook a little, her fingers trembling as she tucked her hair behind her ears. It was hard for me to tell if my sister was distraught or angry now, looking at the hard lines of her face. She looked up at me with flashing eyes. “are you just…”
What was it she didn’t dare to say?
“I have nightmares that I’m back in that room. Seeing Brennan killed.” My voice dropped. “I’m always in that room. Sometimes it seems like all the rest of my life is the dream, that I never really left that room.”
Sometimes I thought maybe I had died with Brennan and this was all a ghost story. But Dylan reassured me that life was real, and it was worth fighting for. I pressed my hand against the wall, knowing he was sleeping on the other side of it.
“Well I guess I can be glad I didn’t see Cliff killed in front of me.”
“Those two scenarios are not the same.” Sudden rage flashed through me and I tried to master it, trying to sum up sympathy for my little sister. But she was sixteen now. She had grown up while I was trying to raise Dylan in Nathan’s looming shadow, and I didn’t have much sympathy left for her.
“It’s exactly the same! You lost your fiancé. And I lost mine.”
“Brennan was my mate,” I corrected. “And no matter what you think now, Cliff could never have been yours.”
“Why is that?” She rubbed the back of her eyes angrily.
“Because you are good,” I said, reaching for my understanding of my sister buried deep beneath all the trauma she’d experienced, all the crappy survival methods she developed. I had to believe that her mean only went skin-deep, to protect a kinder heart. “You’re good, and Cliff was not. He was just like Nathan. Sooner or later, he would have hurt you too.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. He saw me talking to Lawson at the playground. He told Nathan about it, and he knew what would happen to me. He did it on purpose. He said he’d be happy thinking about Nathan punishing me.”
She shook her head, looking horrified…. And disbelieving.
I wasn’t sure I could ever get through to her.
“Did you kill him?” The question came out in a whisper.
Maybe I should have lied to her. But I didn’t have it in me to pretend anymore. I met her gaze evenly. “I did. Not because he hurt me, but because he would have hurt you. I just wanted to protect you.”
I could tell her that he was dying anyway, that I just sealed the deal. But there was no point in making excuses. And it wasn’t as if I were sorry.
She looked at me as if I had struck her. “Was that your revenge?”
“I just told you it wasn’t about revenge. It was about protecting you.”
“ No, not revenge againsthim. Revenge for Brennan.”
Brennan’s name dropped between us like a rock through ice, and its ripples spread through my stomach.
CHAPTER3
Amelia
“Revenge for Brennan?”My voice came out remarkably steady. I tried to sound non-judgmental.
Rose was starting to sob. It was hard to understand what she was saying at first. “I heard you, and I told Mom. It’s all my fault. I just didn’t want you to go.”
Clarity doused me like ice water. “You’re the one that told mom that I was going to run away, and she told Nathan.”
