Outside, somewhere on the ridge, a truck rolled down, and for a second the sound lined up with the sirens. I braced like I always did.
The old reflex to freeze and to make no sound. Trying to hide and not be noticed. It took longer than it should have to reassemble myself and find calm. The truck was already in the driveway by the time I managed to pull my ass out of the horror loop. A figure in Vytek stepped out, and goddamn himfor looking hotter in nerdy forensic gear than when he was half-naked and wearing a mask.
Did I just call Carrington hot?
When I finally pushed away from the window, the house was just as it had been, quiet, except for Carrington coming in, skulking upstairs to his room, and slamming the door. I’d bet the plaster cracked from that. It was so loud that my body froze as the vibrations rippled through me.
Hmm…I guess he wasn’t too happy about my prank. He wasn’t the only one who could play fucking tricks, and I’d had enough of his damn games.
I tried to busy myself with the homework I’d put off doing since coming here, but the dream sat in me like a coin stuck in an old bubble gum machine. You knew you were never getting that fucking gum or your coin again.
But worse than anything else, your coin stopped others from being able to get any either. So it just sat and eroded like my fucking mind.
I moved to the mirror out of some stupid obligation to check for damage, even as the images kept flashing in my head and blotting out my textbooks.
My face was the same: clean-shaven jaw, a tiny patch missing from my eyebrow thanks to Xanthy’s grand idea of making homemade fireworks last year, and the same dirty-blond hair that looked way too much like my fucking father’s now that I was in my twenties.
I had the same faint scar near my lip. I’d learned to hide it when I was younger, yet something in my reflection stared back at me like it had been lingering behind, just waiting to surface.
They were his handprints, and now they’d warped into something worse.
My future, where the perfect replica of the pouting adult sulking in the next room was the one to put them there—a bonafide whining toddler with the body of a sculpted god. I could still feel the phantom press of his hands on my jaw and mouth on my skin.
Nope. Not fucking going there.
A scent came out of nowhere, making me nauseous. The Turkish brash scent of tobacco. It was how my dad smelled. I remembered it on his breath. And I shook my head desperately trying to rid the memories, and purge the scent from my senses.
Despite how hard I fought and tried to focus on anything else, it still floated around me like a noose.
I jerked my head toward the window and rushed over, throwing it wide open to gulp in deep breaths of the cool, wet air outside. The cold sobered me enough to realize the smell wasn’t in my damn mind. It was real. The scent lingered, stubborn and suggestive, leaving that bitter taste of desperation and despair in my gut.
I don’t understand why, but whatever had dragged my memories so painfully to the forefront was leaving an imprint now. Whatever track the dream had laid down in my fucking psyche, I knew with absolute certainty that it wasn’t finished with me, not by a long shot.
I couldn’t settle. My mind raced as the tobacco got stronger.
Could Carrington really be fucking smoking that? How? He couldn’t know what pain it brought.
I took one last deep breath before stepping away from the window. As I made my way back to my textbooks, I noticed something was tucked into the damn doorframe.
An envelope.
It waited there for me, no stamp, just my fucking name. No, not my name. His name for me.
Sunshine.
My stomach dropped. I picked up the damn thing, half contemplating chucking it out the open window and letting Carrington play fetch with his little fucking threats.
Asshole.
Curiosity and plain idiocy got the best of me. I tore it open, my hands already shaking like an addict craving their next fix, before I saw what was inside. A fucking photograph slid into my palm, the edges were stiff, with a glossy surface still smudged with someone else’s fingerprints.
The picture froze me more than the cold air outside.
It wasn’t me now. It was me then, a stupid, naïve, ten-year-old, with a rifle too big for me clutched in my arms, standing stiffly beside…my father.
We were on a hunting trip. My face looked pale and uncomfortable even back then. My hands gripped the gun the way he forced me to hold it.
My father’s arm was slung heavy across my shoulders, a grin carved into his face that never reached his eyes. All those years ago, and I never saw it until it was too late.
