Chapter Twelve
TOREN
The scream that rips from the deepest part of me is something inhuman—raw, guttural, drenched in a kind of pain I didn't know I was capable of feeling. It doesn't sound like me. It sounds like something dying. Maybe it is.
Splatters of Kellan's blood hit my face like warm rain, fragments of bone and brain matter clinging to my skin, my lashes, my lips. The taste of copper floods my mouth and I gag but the scream won't stop, it just keeps pouring out of me as if my body knows something my mind hasn't caught up to yet.
I watch the light leave Kellan’s eyes. Not slowly.
Not gently. It’s ripped away… stolen, extinguished like a flame someone crushed between their fingers just because they could.
The hole in the back of his head is small, almost insignificant compared to the catastrophic ruin of the exit wound I see on his forehead, it’s the only thing I can see.
That jagged, dark circle where a bullet exited and a life ended.
Xaden releases his grip on Kellan’s hair, like he’s discarding trash, and Kellan drops.
I lunge forward, my knees cracking against the ice as I scramble to catch him, but I'm too late.
I'm always too late for the people I love and his face hits the frozen surface with a sound that will haunt me until the day I die.
My hands shake so violently I can barely grip his shoulders as I roll him over, and when I see his face…
the sob that tears out of me is so violent it bends me in half.
His eyes are open. Beautiful, familiar eyes that once looked at me like I was the only thing in this godforsaken world worth seeing.
But there’s nothing behind them now. No warmth.
No mischief. No quiet, stubborn love that he hid from everyone but me.
Just... nothing. A vacancy so absolute it makes me want to claw my own chest open just so the pain has somewhere to go.
“No, no, no, no, no—” The words fall out of me like a prayer to a God I stopped believing in a long time ago.
I gather him against me, pressing his head to my chest, my tears falling onto his cooling skin.
I rock him like he can still feel it. Like he can still hear me. Like love is enough to undo a bullet.
It’s not.
Kellan Kyle was good.
That’s the thing no one else will ever know. Beneath the betrayal, beneath the lies that made me hate him so fiercely I could taste it, he was good. He was trying to protect me the only way he knew how, and I was so goddamn angry at him that I never said the words he deserved to hear.
I never told him I understood.
I never told him I forgave him.
And now, because of Xaden… because of the man whose touch still burns on my skin like a brand, whose voice still echoes in my chest like a second heartbeat I never asked for… I will carry that silence for the rest of my life.
“I’m... so... sorry,” I choke out, my fingertips trembling as they trace the line of his jaw, his cheekbone, and the corner of his mouth that used to quirk up when he was trying not to laugh at something I said.
He was the star of so many of my dreams. He was the boy who made me believe, even briefly, that I could be something other than Masen Kellar's little sister.
Even at the end, even knowing death was breathing down his neck, he tried to shield me.
And I brought death to his door. I got in Xaden's car. I went to that fucking party. I walked willingly into the spider’s web because some treacherous part of me wanted to be caught.
This is my fault.
The guilt doesn't crash into me, it seeps, slow and black, like poison filling every hollow space inside me until I'm drowning in it. I know guilt. Guilt is an old friend, a constant companion, a shadow stitched to my heels. But this guilt has teeth. This guilt has Kellan’s vacant eyes and Xaden’s fingerprints and the memory of my own treacherous heart beating faster every time the man who just murdered my friend looked at me.
That’s the part that’s destroying me. Not just that Kellan is dead.
Not just that I failed him. But somewhere beneath the horror and the grief and the rage, there is a part of me, a sick, broken, irredeemable part, that still aches for the man who pulled the trigger.
I felt it even as the gun went off. That magnetic pull, that gravitational need, that dark and terrible wanting that I can’t cut out of me no matter how hard I try.
I hate myself for it more than I've ever hated anything.
When Xaden crouches down across from me, Kellan’s body still warm between us, I lift my eyes to his and what I find there nearly breaks me all over again.
He’s watching me with those devastating dark eyes, and there it is, that ghost of a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth, like my agony is entertaining.
Like my pain is a performance he’s enjoying.
And still my traitorous heart stumbles.
I want to slap him. I want to claw that almost-smile off his face. I want to press my mouth to his and scream into him until he understands what he’s taken from me. I want to kill him. I want to save him.
I want to burn us both to the ground.
“Do you see it now, Tink?” His voice is silk dragged over broken glass, mocking and intimate in equal measure, and I hate that it still makes something flutter low in my stomach even now, with Kellan’s blood drying on my skin.
“Fuck. You.” My voice is barely human.
He chuckles. He actually fucking chuckles, and the sound hits me like a freight train, slamming against my shattered emotions with such force I feel my sanity crack.
Because I've heard that laugh in different contexts, in the dark, pressed against me, breathed into the curve of my neck and my body, remembering even when my mind is screaming at it to forget.
“You asked me if I would hurt you,” he says, and his voice drops to that low, dangerous register that once made my breath catch for entirely different reasons.
“I warned you that I would hurt you worse than anyone.” He pauses, and his eyes burn into mine with something so intense it feels like being consumed. “And you will love every minute of it.”
The worst part… the part that makes me want to shatter is that he might be right. Because even now, kneeling in my dead friend’s blood, I feel the pull of him like a riptide. And I hate myself for it with every atom of my being.
“I fucking hate you.” I pour every ounce of conviction I possess into those four words, and I mean them.
God, I mean them. But they taste like a lie and a truth all at once, and I think he knows it because something flickers in his eyes, something raw and unguarded before it disappears behind the fortress of his cruelty.
His hand shoots out and grips the back of my neck with a force that’s just this side of painful, yanking me forward over Kellan’s body until his forehead presses against mine.
We’re so close I can feel his breath, can see every shade of darkness in his eyes, can smell the gunpowder on his skin mixed with that scent that is uniquely, infuriatingly him.
“Not as much as I fucking hate you.”
And there it is. The confession neither of us will ever speak aloud.
Because this fury, this violence, this consuming, destructive thing between us, it was never just hate.
Hate doesn't feel like this. Hate doesn't make you feel like you’re being torn apart from the inside. Hate doesn’t make you grieve for someone even as you’re plotting their destruction.
But I’ll call it hate.
I’ll wear it like armor. I’ll sharpen it into a blade because it’s the only thing standing between me and the devastating truth that I am in love with the man who just executed someone I cared about while I watched.
I hold his gaze, and when I speak, my voice is as steady as a funeral bell. “I’m going to destroy you, Xaden. I'll take everything from you and force you to live the way you’ve made me, hollow, haunted, and aching for something you can never have again.”
Something shifts in his expression. Something almost imperceptible. Almost like pain.
Good.
“It’s hard to take something from someone when you already took it, Tink.
” His grip tightens on my neck, possessive even now, and my skin burns where he touches me.
“That's the difference between me and you fucking Kellars. I have nothing left to lose. Everything I loved died over a year ago. All I have now is vengeance.”
Vengeance. The word lands in my chest and takes root because I understand it now in a way I didn't before tonight. Before, vengeance was a concept, a plan, a calculated move on a chessboard. Now it's breathing. Now it has a heartbeat. Now it tastes like Kellan’s blood on my lips, sounds like the echo of a gunshot and feels like Xaden’s hand on my neck—brutal, electric and impossible to escape.
I grip the front of his hoodie and press into him harder, our foreheads grinding together.
Kellan’s body beneath us is like a testament to everything wrong between us.
“You think because you’re alone that makes you strong?
” My laugh is vicious and broken. “Wrong, asshole.
It makes you weak. You may have hated Kellan.
You may have wanted him dead. But Cas didn't, and now your only ally is looking at you in a different light.”
His face pinches in outrage, but I’m not done. Not even close. I shove him backward, loving the way he falls to his ass on the ice, shock fracturing his composure for one satisfying second. I rise to my feet, forcing him to look up at me, and there’s a sneer on his lips but uncertainty in his eyes.
I grip the hem of my blood-soaked shirt and yank it over my head, exposing the small, barely-there swell of my stomach. I run my hand over it slowly, deliberately, and watch his world implode.