He whimpers, and I drape my arm over my knee, counting the staggered rise and fall of his chest. I hold up a clear vial, flicking my finger against the glass to call his attention.
“You’ll be awake to feel everything.” I pause, waiting to feel even a small measure of remorse. I shrug. “This right here is a potent pain reliever. I can administer it before I start burring into your skull. And you might be telling yourself it will be quick. But I promise, time is relative, and pain slows time considerably. Fractions of a second can stretch out like eternity.”
“Jesus, I’ll pay you,” he says, clipped breath fogging the air. “I have money.”
I stare down at him, knowing what he sees, the void in my eyes. “I don’t need money.”
He manages a hard blink. “What the hell, then?”
I drag a hand over my jaw. “Answers.”
I stab the needle into the vial and fill the barrel before setting the syringe aside. “Tell me the truth, Cassian. Don’t lie. I want to know the exact moment you made the choice to kill your own flesh and blood, someone you loved.” I swallow the raw ache. “Tell me every fucking detail.”
After a minute of him uselessly groveling and slinging threats, he finally relents. There’s this phenomena that happens when a personaccepts their death, that the end is unavoidable. A kind of detachment from reality.
Cassian divulges his sordid history in this calm state of detachment. Devoid of emotion, he recounts his brother’s murder like he’s reading from a manual. Maybe he believes this confession will cleanse his soul. Pardon his heinous sins in death.
I should tell him I’m no fucking priest. In the end, I’m not surprised by how uninspired his reason was. Two brothers, partners in sick, twisted crime, stalking the same woman. One takes her for himself, the other devolves into a deplorable state of jealousy and rage.
Repulsion twists my mouth. “A woman can tempt the sanest man mad,” I whisper roughly as the memory of her beside me on the bench is dredged from the depths of my mind, a vision of her eyes glimmering with early stars.
Looking up, I drag in a tight breath, reaching for the awe I once felt at seeing the Milky Way stretched across an expanse of dark sky.
“You know,” I say, voice lowering, “the myth of the Gemini twins was one of sacrifice. Two brothers who loved each other so deeply that when one died, the other begged the gods, offering his own life in exchange. That’s why they were placed among the heavens.” My gaze traces that collection of stars. “So they’d never be separated again.”
Yet here, beneath the constellation, Cassian’s hand clasped to Julian’s cold, lifeless grip, I find no symmetry. Only violence and ruin.
And he’s answered none of my questions.
I’ve spent all this time gazing at her, observing her like a distant star, dreading the moment she’ll go dark. For the fucking instant her light will flicker out, and she’ll collapse into a void before my eyes.
A flame of fury licks through me, and I shove to my feet. “I know I’m sick,” I say as I start to pace. “It’s a sickness. A twisted, consuming sickness, falling for the woman you have no control over killing.”
“Christ, man. You have it bad?—”
“At least give me a goddamn clue,” I grind out, choking back a bitter laugh, teetering on the verge of manic. “She’s a star.” My gaze lifts toward the night sky. “A fucking star. Brilliant and beautiful, and god, so fucking terrifying. I wasn’t expecting her.”
And I didn’t just search her background—I scoured it. Fed every shred of data through my algorithm, trying to find a single damnable act that would mark her like this vile piece of filth at my feet.
There’s nothing—nothing but the hidden fury I sometimes catch burning behind her eyes. The fragile pain she guards so fiercely, desperate not to let it crack through.
My dark anomaly.
Hit with a spicy floral fragrance, I come to an abrupt halt. My gaze lowers to the flower near my boot, finally able to name the elusive, seductive scent that clings to her skin. Dropping to my haunches, I pluck the snapdragon from the earth, bring its silky pink petals to my nose.
A groan wrenches free, muscles strained against the turmoil clawing under my sinew. It’s an agitation I can’t bear, the simmer before the eruption.
“I can’t lose her,” I mutter, voice drained as I drop down near Cassian.
“Naw, you want to kill her.” A dark flicker catches behind his dead eyes. “I can see it, that same crazed look Julian got when the need became too much.” Breath labored, a knowing smile struggles to tip his mouth. “Some girls, they like the fight. They want it, hiding a little darkness in them.” He licks his dry lips, becoming revoltingly aroused by his own victims.
Rage kindles and snaps, a vehement denial on the cusp of my tongue—but his words strike like a punch to my gut, provoking the memory of Collins as I held her pinned against the speaker. Her muscles gathering tight, nails raking for purchase. Her desire to fight swelling beneath her surface like a wave.
That same fierce undercurrent I’ve glimpsed swirling behind her captivating eyes. A dark vein of fury lit, sparked, like a sharp note rising in her tune, before the sudden crash. Banged like a D minor.
My fingers curl around the brittle stem of the flower. As if he can read my deviant thoughts, Cassian’s smile stretches. “Oh yeah, you think about it all the time. Strangling her pretty throat, hearing her cries. Her warm blood flowing over your hands as you take her raw?—”
Making him bloody is barely a formed thought before my fist meets the hard bone of his jaw.
