I swallowed hard, unable to tear my eyes from the scar. It wasn’t from the fall like I’d assumed. It looked deeper, like a knife wound. How did he survive after being split open by his own mother like that? Was he just a kid when it happened?
“Your mind is loud. Ask your question,” he said with a faint smirk, reading me as easily as ever.
I blinked, startled from my thoughts. He was eyeing the umbrella shed in front of the café ahead, but my eyes were on him. I shouldn’t blame him for having the stomach to kill a person, he’d been on the brink of death twice and such things should be expected.
Okay.
I finally found my voice again. “I had no idea. I’m sorry. I thought that scar was from...that night.”
We never talked about that night. It was a black hole, but my curiosity kept pulling me back to it, and I wanted to know how he made it, what happened after, was it then he decided to start tormenting my existence, where he went, who saved him, and just everything he’d been doing for the past six years.
“I fell into the water, so no damage much. Hit my head on a rock in it,” he finally opened up.
My chest grew heavier as we got to the cafe. “How did you...”
“The water swept me to the shore, someone found me and took me to the hospital. Although I don’t know who it was because I woke up a year later.”
As Theon’s words sunk in, it felt like the air had been punched from my lungs. My hand flew to my mouth, muffling the gasp that escaped. His voice had been so calm, so detached, but what he’d just said was anything but. A whole year—he’d been lost to the world for that long, trapped in darkness, while the rest of us went on living, breathing. The thought hit me like a wave, crashing violently in my chest.
I blinked, but it didn’t stop the burning behind my eyes. The tears were already welling up, threatening to spill over. My throat tightened, my heart twisted painfully, and the sadness that gripped me was overwhelming, suffocating. We’d stopped walking, now standing under the café’s shed.
Ma’am Jeena rang the bell inside, waving at me when I looked, and scowling at Theon.
We sat outside. Since he’d fed me the beginning and got me interested, he went all the way in, starting from the part I was most curious about: how he got there just when I needed him.
The ease at which the words flowed out of him made me feel much better. He wasn’t traumatised by the past, just like I wasn’t. I’d chucked everything from that night in one dark part of me, and what the teachers had said back then had helped—it was a hallucination. So I’d pretended it was that, although I knew better.
But Theon never forgot, not when he was in a year-long coma because of it, and the girl that was the cause if it was living life in college. He’d been upset about the fact that there was no police record, leading him to think I left him there on purpose.
When he asked me why I’d been scared instead of relieved when I first saw him after six years, the memory resurfaced, vivid and sharp. I’d been pounding on his door, desperate to break through after I saw him walk out of his hallway, at first thinking he was a serial killer. I’d been scared because I was utterly shocked. I had already written him off as dead—buried that grief, forced myself to move on. Seeing him standing there, alive, in the dead of night, was a true horror. The shock hit me so fast that relief didn’t even have a chance to register. My mind couldn’t grasp it. For a second, I truly believed I was seeing things—a ghost, his ghost, that had come to collect whatever debt we had left between us. It felt like the ground was pulled from under me, and I was left hanging, unable to trust my own eyes.
Relief had come, but it arrived late.
“You two made up?” Ma’am Jeena stepped out of the door with a napkin and a big cup of Vampire Latte. “This is for you, sweetheart.”
I took the cup with a smile, not missing the way she made it obvious she didn’t bring one for Theon. “Thanks, Ma’am Jeena. It tasted really nice the other day.”
The tall, stout, dark-haired woman smiled, her not-so-friendly eyes on Theon. “Mind telling me when you rounded my shop with sad pumpkins?”
Theon turned his head to look at the pumpkins that were still there, now mixed with cruel-looking ones. “You like them, don’t you?”
I choked on the red, foamy latte, dropping it back on the table to hit my chest as I stifled my cough.The way he said that. Ma’am Jeena was probably not expecting that response, her ‘you little shit’ expression told me that much.
I tapped Theon’s leg under the table, his gaze fixed on Ma’am Jeena, staring at her with a face devoid of emotion. A dead, cold face. One he gave to the world, as if flipping everyone in it. If Ma’am Jeena read into it too—
“You have a black soul,” she said, squinting her eyes as they continued their stare.
Okay, here we go. She’s definitely going to bring up her tarot—
“I’ll do a reading for you. Free.”
Right on point. She did that for everyone who came to her café during high school. And she was very good at it. Meaning, there was a chance she’d see that he had killed someone before. Hold on, what if she learned about Hudson? The police wouldn’t believe her, of course, because there was no evidence, but others would, especially when everyone knew how good she was.
“What do you mean?” I chuckled, though my heart pounded in my throat. “He’s literally the sweetest. Did you see my house? What black soul are you talking about?”
She turned to me, her expression serious. “I’ll know when I do a reading. Give me a minute.”
“What?” I laughed outright, forcing it. “No. Look, I saw five people go in just now. Shouldn’t you attend to them, and oh, show them this Vampire stuff you made?”
