Chapter 17
I was never afraid of my own shadow, but Reese’s is a different story.
I wake sometime in the middle of the night. I don’t move. My brain feels like someone shook it loose inside my skull, and now it’s slowly settling back into place.
The concrete floor is cold beneath me, my cheek pressed against it. Somewhere nearby, a light hums with electricity. I let my breathing stay slow and shallow while my mind catches up with the last twelve hours.
Reese is alive.
Superpowers are apparently real, which honestly feels like the bigger problem but somehow also the least surprising development of the day.
Malcolm fucking betrayed me.
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter, just wanting to forget. But I can’t.
The memories come back in fragments. Reese standing in front of me with his hand around my throat, shadows crawling along the walls like they had minds of their own. The way the air in the room had felt wrong, heavy and pressing against my ribs as a dead man told me things I didn’t want to believe.
The moment those shadows snapped toward me, that part I remember clearly.
It wasn’t just darkness. It was something deeper than that.
Something alive. They wrapped around my chest and throat, and for a second…
I thought I was going to die. Not in the metaphorical wow this situation sucks kind of way.
In the very real my lungs are collapsing and the world is ending kind of way.
Then everything went black.
So…not my best day.
I still haven’t moved, yet I start feeling dizzy. It’s still all too fucking much. When darkness comes again, I willingly let it take me.
The next time I wake, it’s to a soft touch against my cheek.
Then my eyes snap open to the sight of him kneeling beside me, and my body reacts before my mind does.
I sit up and scramble backward across the floor so fast my shoulder slams into the wall behind me.
The movement scrapes my palms against the concrete, but I barely feel it over the adrenaline flooding my system.
Like my brain forgot he was alive, and it believed for a split second that I was seeing a ghost.
Reincarnation is real.
Near-death experiences can cause superpowers.
Ghosts would seem normal right about now.
But here he is in the flesh, real and tangible, looking exactly like himself and completely wrong at the same time.
Older and harder with something darker threaded through the sharp lines of his face.
He’s wearing black again today like it’s the only color of clothes he owns. Apparently, he’s upgraded from gray.
He leans back on his heels like my reaction amuses him, and a slow smirk curves his mouth.
“Ready to play, little menace?”
I start shivering as though I just had a bucket of ice water dumped on me. It’s the way he said it, the way he looks at me like a predator would look at prey.
The shadows all around the room stretch across the walls and ceiling like ink spilled in water, thick and slow and wrong.
When Reese moves, they move with him, not quite attached but close enough to make my skin crawl.
There’s a strange pressure in the air when he’s around, like the atmosphere bends slightly in his direction.
“Always down for a friendly game of Battleship,” I say because…of course, I can’t help myself.
One corner of his mouth twitches. It’s not quite a smile, but it’s close enough that something traitorous in my chest reacts to it, remembering all those times I managed to crack through his hard shell.
At least he doesn’t seem as annoyed as he was yesterday.
But then he stands, looming over me, and my body reacts before my brain can stop it. Every muscle tightens, instinct screaming that the shadows around his feet are about to lunge.
Reese notices.
“Relax,” he says, his tone flat. “If I wanted you dead, you’d already be a memory.”
“Comforting,” I mutter. “Real romantic. You practice that line in the mirror or—”
“You still think this is a fucking joke?”
“I think my uncle arranged my kidnapping, my presumed-dead twice-kidnapper is apparently a walking paranormal event, and I just woke up on a basement floor for the second time in my life.” I narrow my eyes in an act of retaliation. “So, yeah. Humor feels like a reasonable coping mechanism.”
He stares at me in silence for several seconds before something flickers across his expression too fast for me to name.
Then the shadows move.
Cold pressure slams into my chest so suddenly that the breath punches out of my lungs, that same awful, heavy weight pressing against my ribs as before I passed out.
I gasp, doubling over as the air thickens around me.
It’s not just fear. It’s worse than fear.
It’s a deep, bone-level terror that doesn’t belong to me, like my body suddenly remembers every nightmare it’s ever had all at once.
“Reese.” I barely manage to get any sound out, let alone words. “Please.”
The shadows tighten around my chest. I can physically feel them, as though they’re as real as he is.
I cough as the pressure creeps up my throat, clawing its way up.
Any other sounds that come from me dissolve into choking.
It feels like I’m drowning in smoke, as though the shadows are inside my lungs.
Reese watches me struggle, his face unreadable.
“You don’t even understand what it is you’ve done, do you?”
The shadows ease off enough for me to drag in a ragged breath that tastes like ash and metal.
“I fucked up,” I wheeze. “Not really anything new there.”
Pain sparks through my ribs as my lungs seize, like they’re being filled to the brim with his darkness. White spots flash around the edges of my vision as the dread grows stronger, coiling tighter around my spine.
“You destroyed everything,” he says, almost too quietly to reach me over the excruciating pain. “You have no idea how many lives you ruined.”
My chest heaves as I force air back into my lungs in one of the rare moments he lets me actually breathe.
“Look,” I croak. “In my defense, anonymous internet revenge plots rarely come with a mass casualty disclaimer.”
His expression doesn’t change, not even a flicker. The next time he speaks, his voice is low and steady, but there’s something colder and more jagged beneath it.
“And yet they’re still dead. Nearly forty of them.”
The words drop like a hundred lead weights into my gut. My stomach twists. The tears blurring my vision grow thicker until he looks more like the man I left behind in that basement, his face distorted as all I could do was cry.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper.
“It doesn’t fucking matter.”
The shadows slam into me again, this time so hard I swear it cracks a rib.
I think I scream. I’m in too much fucking pain to worry about how I’m able to physically feel them, but it’s one of the strangest sensations I’ve ever experienced.
They crush all the air from my lungs as my pulse roars in my ears.
After nearly a minute of that—though it feels much longer—the shadows let me breathe again. Kind of. Just enough to keep me from blacking out.
“Malcolm.” I’m fighting just to breathe, let alone speak. “He tricked me.”
“And if I could get to him, he’d be the one crying on this floor and fighting for breath right now.
But look how easily I could get to you. You were so eager to take revenge on the person who hired me for the sake of your uncle and the Institute, but look how quick he is to protect you.
If you thought Malcolm ever cared about you, you were wrong. ”
That’s why he thinks I did it?
To avenge the Institute?
For a second, less than a second, something shifts in the way the shadows envelope me. It feels almost…comforting. Like they’re swaddling me. I could compare it to the way his knuckles brushed my cheek, like he has to balance his cruel words with a gentle touch.
But then they squeeze again, and I don’t know if it was real.
I sob. “I’m sorry, Reese. I’m s-so fucking sorry.”
“I don’t fucking care.” His voice is deeper, darker, like he’s becoming his shadows. “Sorry doesn’t bring them back.”
They surge again. This time, they slip deeper into my lungs, filling the spaces where air should be. I choke on the darkness, coughing hard enough that my chest burns. My brain scrambles for something, anything, that might make this stop. Make him stop.
I could tell him.
I could tell him the truth, the real reason I went after those anonymous accounts without a name. Not to seek vengeance for Malcolm, but for him. For Reese. Because, in my mind, that’s who killed him—the person who hired him, not the people who rescued me.
I could tell him that I spent years hunting them down because revenge was the only thing that made the grief bearable, that kept me breathing after he was gone.
I could tell him that losing him hollowed me out so badly I didn’t know what else to do with the empty space.
But the words never leave my mouth.
Because if I say that…
If he hears how completely his death ruined me…
He’ll know.
He’ll know how I was never able to move on from him, my fucking abductor. He’ll know I built my entire life around a man who kidnapped me and then died before I could barely hope he would run away with me.
Fucking pathetic.
And for the first time, I truly feel like it.
Pathetic. Weak. Desperate.
I think if he saw that, it’d be worse than the torture. Especially if it didn’t stop.
So I swallow the only words that could possibly save me. I have my doubts they would anyway. He wants to hurt me, and I don’t think anything will change his mind.
I lean sideways against the wall, my nail scraping against the concrete like maybe I could hold on to it for dear life.
Every time his shadows ease their hold on me, I focus on breathing, on pushing the dread and the darkness away.
But it all returns seconds later, the shadows swooping down to attack again.
I’m gasping, choking, coughing, sputtering. My face is drenched with tears, and I can’t see anything past the blur of them.
Okay, so I’m already pathetic and weak and desperate. But it could be worse if he knew the truth.
The pain is everywhere, but mostly in my lungs and in my head. As it gets harder and harder to breathe, the dread turns to panic and the panic turns to horror.
He’s going to fucking kill me.
The shadows retreat.
My body slumps against the wall, and my shoulders shake with every sob that rips its way out of my chest. I don’t even realize they’re gone right away because all that dread lingers. I might actually want him to kill me right now.
Reese is close, his shadows drawing in around him, while agony and misery echo through me until they share the same pulse.
He steps closer. Close enough that, after I blink back the tears, I can make out the scars along his jaw and temple. Close enough that I can feel the heat of him even through the shadows that swim around us both.
And then, his gaze drops to my mouth.
It’s quick, accidental almost.
But I latch onto it.
“Do you still think about it?” It feels like I swallowed a hundred rose stems when I speak, thorns cutting up the inside of my throat. I smirk my way through it. “How that moment was stolen from us? How you were robbed of your first kiss with a man?”
Please say yes.
Please say you haven’t fucking had another.
I don’t tell him I still think about it, that I’ve never stopped thinking about it.
He doesn’t answer, just continues staring down at me. More tears well in my eyes, and his head tilts. I was already crying, so I’m sure he doesn’t think anything of it. I’m sure he can’t tell I’m thinking about it right now.
When he does finally speak, his voice is softer than it’s been since he walked through the door.
“You always were stubborn.”
“Occupational hazard of surviving you once already.”
His brow is furrowed deep. I’ve noticed that his shadows react instinctively when his anger spikes, but right now, they’re hesitating, like they’re waiting for him to decide how much further to push.
He exhales slowly, and I think maybe he’s not entirely sure he wants to keep pushing.
“You ruined everything,” he says, even quieter than before.
I lift my head, raising my chin in the air. “And you’re still not killing me.”
For a moment, neither of us moves. Something I can’t read flickers over his face again. Then he retreats back a step as his shadows push forward, weaving their way across the floor toward me.
“You’re going to wish I had.”
But the way he says it…
It almost sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.