“The body.”
thirty-three
Dex - Past
IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.
I’d always intended to bring Jonah here eventually. I wanted him to know my scars. I just didn’t expect that he’d see the wound first.
When we were done here, if he still wanted me, I’d make sure he knew everything. All my secrets. I hadn’t told him about my past, had been very careful not to reveal it to him, not to burden him with it. But it was too late now. He knew. And if he was going to see the festering wound I carried with me always, then he should know the weapon that caused it.
I didn’t want this to be the way he found out about it. I thought maybe we’d be able to avoid it happening like this. Because when Jonah was with me, the nightmares weren’t. Until last night. Hours after experiencing his touch—wanted, craved, perfect, safe—and my mind had twisted. The demons I’d thought were missing when I was with him were only sleeping, and they’d woken. They’d tainted us, forming vivid pictures of another time, another touch—unwanted, despised, repulsive, unsafe.
The nightmares werehisway of reaching me, even from here, beyond the veil of death. His touch corrupting the best thing I’d ever had. My rabbit.
“Who’s body is here?” Jonah asked me.
I’d brought him out here, to this dreadful place, and he hadn’t questioned it. I’d isolated him here in the middle of the forest and told him about the first body, and still he didn’t have any fear of me. All I could read in his eyes was a genuine desire to know me.To understand me. I just hoped he wouldn’t regret that when he did.
Jonah had dropped his walls for me, and it was time for me to do the same, to let him see all of me.
“His name was Pierce.” The name alone felt like a curse. “He was my mother’s boyfriend.”
Jonah’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, that fire that had once been directed at me igniting, blazing hotter and fiercer. It wasn’t directed at me anymore, but at the ghost of the man who had hurt me. Now his fire burned on my behalf, and I loved it more than ever.
“And…” I knew the question that was coming before it even left his lips. “You killed him?”
I searched his eyes, looking for the fear that should have come with a question like that. It still wasn’t there, as though whether I was a murderer wouldn’t change anything between us; he just needed to know.
“No,” I answered honestly. “But I wish I had. I wish with everything inside me I’d had the chance to make him pay for what he did to me.”
Jonah’s eyes burned, fire into lava, molten, liquid rage filling his eyes and seeping out, trickling down his cheek as he nodded once. “So who killed him?”
I felt a smile pull at my lips—a disguise, a mask—because that was the rest of the wound. “My mother.”
“For what he did to you?”
I laughed. Mirthless. Bitter.
“No. You know, all these years and I never asked her why. Figured she might put me in the ground right beside him. She would if she ever knew what we’d done.”
More tears. His brow furrowed as if he were fighting rage with rage. Fire with fire. I’d always found his rage so beautiful, but it wasso muchmorewhen it burned on my behalf. It was ethereal. It was sanctifying. It was holy. No one had ever cried for me before.
“Thensheshould be in the ground with him.”
Vindication. A weight on my chest I’d carried for years easing, cracking, crumbling. I could breathe deeper.
“Maybe,” I admitted. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it.
His eyes turned away from me, and I felt more vulnerable without them than when he peered right into the center of me. He glared at the ground, as if his anger could seep beneath the dirt and find the soul in hell that had hurt me. “When?”
“When did I bring him here?”
“That too.”
“Ah, when did he hurt me?”
“Yes.”
