“I don’t know,” she admits, her eyes growing watery as she hesitantly inches away from my touch. “It was maybe eight years ago. Something happened to cause this scar. A fire, maybe. I’m not sure. All I know is that it landed me in a coma for eight months with a fracture and severe brain swelling. I had burns across my body that were mostly healing, but I had no memory of what happened. Of who I was. The doctors said that nobody came looking for me. Nobody tried to claim me. I was just . . . alone.”
I shake my head. I would have known if she were in a coma for eight months.
“The doctors said there was a chance that I might get my memories back, but they weren’t hopeful, and with nobody coming to claim me, I had no choice but to start a new life,” she tells me. “I don’t know who I used to be. My name—Aria Ashford—was made up just to try and give me some kind of identity. I don’t know where I lived, where I grew up, what friends I had. I don’t know if I had a family. Parents or siblings who were missing me. I just had . . . nothing, but I know myself. I know what kind of person I am on the inside, and you . . . There’s no way. You’re—”
A shaky breath tears from deep in my chest, and my hand completely falls away from her throat as I try to piece together everything she’s said, trying to figure out her timeline. Because eight years ago . . . fuck.
“You said there was a fire?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “I assume so,” she murmurs, reaching for the hemline of her top and lifting it enough so that I see the healed burns across her waist. “Third degree burns. There’s more on my thighs. I had to have skin grafts, but formost of it, I was in a coma. When I woke, the hard work was pretty much done. Still sucked though.”
Fuck.
There’s no way. That night with the fire. That was the night everything changed.
I thought she’d gotten out. I thought she was okay. I was being dragged away by the police after slaughtering six men in cold blood, but I saw her through the smoke, and if I hadn’t gotten to her, the cops would have. I taught her to get away. I knew it in my gut. She had to have been okay, because the alternative is that I left her there to die. I didn’t protect her like I should have, like I always vowed to do.
I shake my head, stepping away from her. “No, no, no.”
If she was trapped that night, burned, injured so badly she was in a coma for eight months without a clue who she was, then she never betrayed me. My sweet menace never came forward to clear my name because she was lying in a hospital bed alone. She didn’t know who I was, didn’t know how desperately I was counting on her, didn’t know that I needed her to speak up and save me from a hundred and ninety-two years behind bars.
All these fucking years, I kept quiet, biding my time until I saw her again, letting the rage build inside of me until I didn’t even recognize the man I had become. All of it based on my belief that the one person who meant anything to me had betrayed me. Hell, I’d even wondered if maybe she had died that night, that everything had happened so fast, and I just didn’t know what I was seeing through the smoke, but I knew that wasn’t true. If she had died, I would have felt it in my bones.
I had assumed she just never came forward. Assumed she was content with allowing me to rot behind bars. Assumed she had reveled in her betrayal.
But maybe she hadn’t.
Maybe I’ve had it wrong all this time.
Maybe I’m the one who let her down.
14
STONE
It’s well beyond nightfall as we continue through the thickening woods, walking in companionable silence, both of us deep in thought. I no longer have the overwhelming need to end her life, but that doesn’t mean I trust her. She could be lying. Hell, she’s good at it. I taught her well. But if her story is true, and she has no recollection of her past from before seventeen years old, then I’ve given her more than enough to think about.
Her stomach has been growling for hours. Hell, it’s been that way since we were in the tunnel, but there’s not a lot I can do about that right now.
My top priority is getting us somewhere safe, far away from anyone who’s going to hunt me down. Then once we get through this bushland and find a small town, we can focus on stocking up on everything we might need. Until then, we’re living off the land.
Growing up the way I did, this isn’t exactly my first time being on the run from the cops. It’s definitely the first time it’s been at this magnitude. It’s not even the first time Menace has been on the run. Though I suppose she has no fucking clue about that, meaning she probably also doesn’t recall all the tough lessons that shit taught us.
The thought of her accident has my gaze shifting toward her. Her stare is focused heavily on the uneven ground beneath her feet. It’s almost pitch black out here, the moon being our only guiding light. She’s struggling, and judging by the way her arms are wrapped around her body, she’s starting to get cold.
I had every intention of walking through the night. It won’t be long until the guards figure out how I escaped, and that I did so with a hostage. When they discover that sewer line, it’s going to lead them directly into the very woods that we’re in. When that happens, we can’t be here. But I also can’t keep punishing her like this. She didn’t ask for this, and if she is being honest, then she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, having no fucking idea of the history she held with the man she came to interview.
Fuck.
Clenching my jaw, I give in to the inner turmoil. “We can stop here,” I murmur.
Her head snaps up, her eyes going wide as though barely believing my words. “Oh, thank God,” she says, heavily collapsing against a big tree before dropping right down to her ass. She sits against the trunk, bracing her elbows against her knees as she hangs her head, closing her eyes as the exhaustion of the day quickly catches up to her.
As she rests, I take a few more steps before pausing and looking out at the vast bushland ahead of us. We still have who knows how fucking long ahead of us, but if we can rest for a fewhours, we should be good to continue at a better pace and cover more ground.
“Do you know how to make a fire?” she asks.
I look back to find Aria scrounging through the fallen foliage around her, picking out a bunch of sticks. “No.”
