My fingers dug into the comforter as I fisted my hands. There was a challenge in her stare, one as transparent as black ice. Her confessions came with a price, and from what I could tell, no one had been willing to pay it before.
I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. My gaze latched on to her. Maybe she was used to people letting her go, but I wasn’t one of them.
My heart rate spiked as I stared at her, laid out on the bed beneath me. Her hair was fanned out around her head, making her look like a damn lost angel. Slowly, inch by inch, I leaned down toward her.
Her chest started to heave with her rapid breaths. I stopped when only a few inches stretched between our faces. She smelled faintly of the bar, but mostly of herself…wild jasmine and something warmer—vanilla, maybe. I inhaled deeply before I whispered, “What do you want to know?”
She blinked rapidly, like she was trying to hide that she was flustered.
“What was the worst day of your life?”
Cutting right to the heart, then. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but my stomach sank and roiled against the idea. Quinn wouldn’t have asked for anything less than the moment that broke me, I supposed.
My gaze dipped to her mouth briefly before I pulled away, straightening.
Her chest hitched, like she’d been holding her breath. She sat up, turning to look at me. I could tell she didn’t expect an answer.
“I have two,” I said softly, folding my arms over my chest.
There was a pause as I gathered my courage. It had been a long, long time since I’d spoken of the things I was about to unleash on her.
“Two?”
I nodded. “One was the day I found out that my little sister was murdered.”
She flinched, sadness taking over her features.
“But you already knew about that. So it’s not much of a secret.”
She nodded, her eyes darting from mine for a moment.
“The second,” I continued, my ribs feeling like they were collapsing around my lungs, “was the day I lost my fiancée.”
She froze. Unmoving to the point I wasn’t sure she was breathing.
My pulse thundered in my ears as my mind went back to that day, the moment I heard the news…the vision of walking into that morgue to identify her body. A lump formed in my throat too large to swallow.
“What happened to her?” Quinn whispered.
A headache throbbed in my temples. I turned away from her, suddenly not able to look her in the face as I told this story. I lowered onto the end of the bed, sitting with my back to her.
I blinked at my reflection in the mirror on the wall across from me. I was too pale. Quinn’s body was blocked by mine, but she was still sitting up, waiting.
“I got my doctorate from a criminal justice school in New York,” I said, voice flat. “I lived in the city for a while. I liked it at first. It was so different from Ember Hollow.”
I’d liked how there was always so much to do there. So much to see and experience.
“I—I eventually met someone. She was a nurse at the hospital where I was completing my internship.” I cleared my throat as that lump surfaced again, choking off my next words. “Her name was Blair.”
I closed my eyes. It had been four years now, but some days it was never easier. I hadn’t said her name for so long. Like scratching off a healing scab, it felt good for a moment, but it made you bleed.
“We got our own place and even though I had always planned to come back home after I completed my schooling, I was starting a different life there. After about a year working as a licensed professional, I started teaching a couple of collegeclasses on the side—” Fisting my hands, I let out a slow breath through my nose. “School was something I always enjoyed, and I loved teaching. I had this student in my criminal profiling class who took a special interest in the subject.
“He was always staying after class to ask me questions and doing extra work on all aspects of the criminal mind. I thought—” I let out a shaky, humorless laugh. “I thought he was dedicated to the work. Curious and driven. I always made time for him when I could, thinking he was a good kid.”
Dread pooled in the pit of my stomach, the cold spreading through my veins as I remembered him. His face. His voice. The way he would smile and greet me in the mornings. Nausea shuddered through me.
Quinn shifted behind me, but she didn’t say anything.
