Page 21 of Don’t Let Him In

Resistance dwindles as his previous revelation circles back with brutal clarity, each word a battering ram.

“I’m so sorry, Tatum.”

“You didn’t survive.”

An otherworldly shriek practically splits the world in two. Stretching past the point of reason, thinning into a ragged rasp until my throat feels meaty and raw.

“Please don’t freak out.” Manson reaches for me before stopping himself, his complexion sallow, eyes sad. “You promised you wouldn’t pull back.”

My gaze drops to where my hand is wedged between my thighs. The blood smeared across my fingertips overtakes my vision until it’s all I see.

A sickening cocktail of cranberry red. Some parts bright and others smudged into darker, jelly-like clots.

Shaking my head again in disbelief, a rattling pang strikes the base of my skull, making me wince as my vision fractures. “I don’t understand.”

My voice sounds feeble and foreign, even to my own ears.

Glancing through my tear-dotted lashes, I turn my bloodied hand over and furiously scrub it across my tights, smearing red streaks over the thin fabric as I search Manson’s pitying gaze for a crack in his certainty.

The last of my doubt withers.

He’s being serious.

Oh my God.

He’s serious.

Manson’s lips part a fraction more, but whatever he meant to say dies before it reaches his tongue. Instead, he leans in and cups my jaw, his thumb grazing my skin in slow, tentative strokes.

It’s cold.

Like the rest of him.

Like the rest of me.

“I’m sorry you had to learn it this way,” he finally says. “But it’s safer now. You’re safer.”

Flinching, I hunch my shoulders and lean far enough for him to retract his touch from my jaw. The sharp pang in my gut hollows out my insides until I’m little more than a shell in his presence.

“I just mean nobody else can hurt you.”

His Adam’s apple rolls in his throat. The shadows deepen the black of his irises as his attention drifts across my face, briefly straying to my lips before returning to my eyes. For a split second, I could’ve sworn I caught a glimpse of genuine emotion in his carefully constructed expression. A thinly veiled flicker of understanding.

I swallow hard. An uneasy weight settles heavy in my chest, exposing an empty pit of sorrow I suspect he carries too.

I’ve misjudged him.

A sad sickness turns in my stomach as I consider the pain that must’ve come before…

Before he⁠—

Instinct has me clenching the floorboard, fingers digging into the rusted nail half-hammered into the warped plank, unable to even think it in the privacy of my own mind. My mouth is a landscape of cotton and ash, yet the knot in my chest begins to loosen, if only slightly.

Flattening my lips, I try to push the thoughts away, but I can’t. Part of me wonders why he’s here.

Why he’s staying.

Why he cares.