“What happened?”
“Haven happened.”
I glance down at the figure sleeping between us. Peaceful, scented with soap and shampoo, nothing like the blood-soaked creature I peeled out of Kai’s jacket.
“She attacked Ezra when he turned the gun on me.” Kai’s voice wobbles like he’s struggling to hold back hysterical laughter. “Carved him up like a fucking turkey.”
“With a knife?”
“No. Yes. It—it was one of those electric things. She just stuck it in him and wouldn’t stop. She’d gouged a hole in him by the time I pulled her off.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
The fugue state makes sense now—her mind can’t process what she’s done.
“Then you ran?” My voice is tight.
We’re definitely not safe. Kai and Haven are fugitives on the run from a triple homicide. No one will know what Ezra planned to do. They’ll just see a Thanksgiving massacre and two missing suspects.
“We had to,” Kai mumbles, voice unsteady. “Everyone was dead. If we stayed…”
They’d be taken in for questioning the moment the cops arrived. And, unable to prove the insane story he just told me, they’d be arrested. strong
“We’ll fix this,” I tell him, not that I have any fucking clue how to cover up three murders without implicating myself as an accessory.
Kai relaxes his grip on my fingers, but he doesn’t let go. When I stroke my thumb down the side of his hand, he doesn’t pull away.
“I need…” He trails off.
“Anything,” I murmur.
When he says nothing, I pull his hand out from under the sheet and press my lips to his knuckles. “Safe space, Kai.”
“I need to tell you something,” he rasps.
The disappointment is instantaneous.
I thought he was going to ask for something else.
That he needed…me.
“I’m listening.” I kiss his hand again, because he smells like my body wash and I can’t help but lean into the possessiveness coursing through my body.
“She was still alive,” Kai chokes out.
I prop myself up on my elbow, but I can’t make out his features in the shadows. “You left your mother alive?—”
“No, she’s not—not anymore.” His voice is still thick, but he forces himself to speak. “I…made sure.”
When I don’t say anything, he rushes out, “She saw Haven kill Ezra. She would have told the cops that Haven?—”
“Shh,” I cut in, when his voice rises.
“She would have destroyed Haven. Blamed everything on her. I couldn’t let that happen.”
A normal person would feel revulsion. Horror even.
The boy I’ve been obsessing over just admitted to matricide. His girlfriend slaughtered his brother. Then they ran from the scene of the crime.
