When Sky Breaks: Burn & Break Duet Book 2

Prologue

Rain paintsthe earth for three days following the moment my heart broke.

Fierce strokes batter against my bedroom window, mirroring my emotional state and its rising desperation.

My chest aches in a way I never experienced, even with all the trauma and tragedy I endured as a child. Not even the strike of my father’s fist hurt as severely as August hurt me.

He killed my baby brother.

And it was Trek’s idea.

Whether it was misguided vengeance or some moral compass they forged on their own, they took it into their hands to decimate my life.

Numb, I don’t feel the tears splashing onto my arms, my hands, or trailing down between my fingers. The trees outside my window blur as thunder coils and rolls through the sky.

Even the heavens are upset.

By day four, the pain and sadness morphs into anger, curling like a snake in my belly, primed to strike at any provocation.

How could they do this to me?

For one measly year, August was my steady rock in the ocean, anchoring me whenever I needed him. Nine-year-old me clung to his kindness—his confidence that everything would be okay.

Then August made a rash decision, irrevocably shifting my entire life. For far too long, he left me wondering what I’d done to earn his lack of attention. He ignored me, pretended I didn’t exist. But like magnets we collided once again, a trajectory even gravity couldn’t pull apart.

However, the truth always comes out, and it didn’t set me free.

My heart’s tangled in so many knots I don’t know where one ends and the other begins. A war wages, the pendulum swinging one way and back again.

I hate him.

I love him.

Screwhim.

I miss him.

I need him.

Fuck him.

Why, August, why?

* * *

“Sky, will you please talk to me?” The muffled plea outside the door startles me and I clutch my blanket even tighter.

“Go away,” I croak.

Ignoring Trek has been challenging. Foster senses something’s wrong, but answering his questions honestly will only drive a wedge between him and Trek. As much as I hate my brother, I can’t take Foster away from his only son.

I can’t do what he did to me.

“I’m so sorry. Please let me make this right.”

“I said go away!” My shout echoes, sounding as hollow as my heart.

Trek’s footsteps shuffle down the hallway along with his heavy sigh. There’s nothing he can do to fix this, and his pitying looks rival that of a kicked dog. The lies burrow under the layers of love I had for him as if we were flesh and blood.

A week later, the dam of my resistance breaks. I’ve texted August, demanding he explain, my fingers bruised by my insistence. In return? Bitter silence. I’ve called and his phone is out of minutes, like I’m out of patience.

My fists ache at my sides and my lungs burn with fury. His driveway is too fucking long, but I force one foot in front of the other, refusing to back down. I need to talk to him—to understand why. There must’ve been another way to save me without killing my baby brother. There had to be.

Heading straight to the source, I ignore the voice telling me to turn around, to forget him. But I can’t forget him, just like I can’t forget Chase. It’s the ultimate conflict.

My heart versus my brain.

Right versus wrong.

My feet crunch over the gravel drive. The skies twist with gray clouds, urging me to move forward despite the resistance in my steps.

I can do this.

A gasp catches in my throat once I reach the threshold of August’s property.

Nothing’s quite that simple, though, is it?

Where his car once sat is now just a pile of tall, unkempt grass and a bottle of water tipped on its side atop the sloshy ground.

No motorcycle, no tent, no trace of anything resembling him left.

It’s as if he never existed.

There’s a hollowing inside my guts, like a knife dragging through flesh and bone. Betrayal tunnels into the bare corners. He told me two months was all I’d get. With an iron will, I took the scraps, but then he took my body—my soul. I should’ve known I’d never walk away unscathed by the likes of August Moore. He hooks you, cares for you, then drops you when things get tough. Disappears and takes pieces of you with him.

The pressure in my chest grows, becoming a sharp pain, and I double over, retching in the grass. Bile scrapes my throat, searing my tender skin. My vision blurs with hot tears, and I grind the heels of my palms into my sockets.

He doesn’t get to own any more of me.

Disbelief befriends hurt and rage as I take another glance around the barren plot of land. Maybe I made it all up. Perhaps he didn’t exist, and it was all the ridiculous imagination of a lonely girl. Tomorrow I’ll wake in my bed and be in a new life, one where I never met him.

A flash of anger scorches my chest. Delusions born from madness.

Pain radiates across my palms where I’ve dug my nails in so deep I’ll have bruises.

“You’re a coward!” I scream and choke on the desire to inflict the same pain on him as he put on me.

Gratitude only scratches the surface. The boy who stole my nine-year-old heart, the one who kept it safe from harm, the man who ignited my sense of purpose in just two short months only to snuff out the blaze…vanished.

Air rattles in my lungs as a pathetic laugh escapes to hide the ache. “I should’ve listened to Trek and stayed away.”

Even Trek’s name leaves me itching to fight, to expel this pent-up anger onto someone just as guilty as August. How could my own brother hurt me like this?

Heat rises from the damp earth, clinging to my skin like a suffocating blanket. My feet squelch in the grass as reality wounds me further.

I was nothing but a plaything. A pawn in a twisted game. Expendable by those who claimed they cared.

It’s fucked up.

There’s no resolution, no waking from this nightmare. No conclusion to this tragic love story.

Before I falter and sink to my knees again in an endless loop of grief, I turn and head back to the place I used to call home.