When her eyes meet mine, they shine. Something cracks inside my heart, a fissure beneath the strata of time and anger. A sliver of space that she climbs inside, like roots between fractures in pavement. And her presence in that crevice only grows when she blinks her tears away. They mount a protest at her lash line, refusing to be subdued.
“We don’t talk,” Harper whispers, a dying protest. She backs away from my touch, and it stings more than I thought it would.
I let my hand fall to my side. “We’re talking now.”
“We are not.”
“Then what are we doing?”
“We’re … I don’t know …” Harper looks away again. She’s fighting herself with every moment that passes. A tear finally breaches her lash line. Her voice is hushed when she says, “I’m losing my best friend.” Her lips tremble as she swipes at her cheek with the edge of her bloody glove. “I’m a shitty caregiver. I missed the symptoms, and now he’s in the hospital when it’s something I should have caught. I’m out of my depth.”
She sniffs and looks down at the ground. Maybe that weight she carries is a little lighter with her confession. If I could, I’d reach out and reel her into me. Let her cry against my chest. “I don’t think most people who have the responsibility of looking after another person get a guidebook. You’re doing the best you can,” I say instead, and her tear-filled eyes snap to mine.
“Why are you voluntarily being nice to me?” she asks. Wariness rolls from her in waves.
“Because … I don’t want to see you upset.”
Her eyes narrow. “But you’ve come here to inflict the maximum amount of suffering on me as possible.”
“Maybe I did,” I admit. “But that’s not why I’m here now.”
“Is this part of your game to get your book back?”
“No, I—”
A roar of sound rushes toward me, my next words cut off as I’m thrown face-first to the ground, the air shoved from my lungs. Sudden pain burns in my shoulder as a heavy block pins me to the lawn. A heartbeat later, the weight is gone, though it leaves behind something lodged deep in my deltoid. But the searing pain barely registers as fear takes over, all of it concentrated only on Harper.
When I look up, the man from the grass is stumbling toward her, ropes trailing after him with steel pegs bouncing in his wake. He has the spike aerator clutched in his hands, swinging it like a mace as Harper backs away from him. Her ax is raised, but he’s got the more powerful weapon. And he’s the one with everything to lose.
I grab one of the ropes, twist it around my fist, and pull.
The man stumbles. But he doesn’t go down. He turns on me and swings the aerator in my direction. I raise my arm to take the hit. He only catches me with a wheel, but the strength of his blow radiates through my elbow in a shock of pain. I swear I can feel it vibrate through the titanium screws. I let out an agonized rasp, but a louder sound drowns me out. One of determination. Harper.
“Get the fuck away from him,” she snarls.
Harper’s ax slices through the air and lands in his neck with a sickening thwack. Blood lashes across my face.
Everything goes quiet. Everything goes still.
The man’s wide blue eyes are fixed to mine as his fingers unfurl from the handle of the aerator. It drops to the ground next to him as he falls to his knees, his other hand rising to graze the ax lodged at the juncture of his shoulder. With a garbled, liquid swallow, he falls flat on his face and dies.
For a moment, neither of us moves. Harper’s eyes coast over me to alight on the source of the pain that now throbs in my shoulder. She reaches out a tentative hand toward me, but stops herself. “Are you okay?”
A thousand images of what could have happened to her fly through my head as I rise.
“No. I am fucking not okay,” I say, barely managing to keep my voice from a yell as I reach behind my shoulder to pull the peg from my flesh. I toss the bloody spike at her feet. “Jesus fucking Christ, Harper.” I drag a trembling hand through my hair. Breaths saw from my chest. I want to grab her by the arms and stare into her eyes and shake her to her senses. Then I want to crush her to me and never let her go. “Don’t you know what could have happened?”
A look of hurt flashes across her face. And then it dissolves into something lightless. Something deadly. Before I have a chance to take a breath and clarify, all her pent-up fury comes pouring from her mouth. “Oh, I fucking get it. Just like I thought. It all comes down to your fucking scrapbook. That’s what everything is about, isn’t it? Including the other night. You’re fucking toying with me. If you can’t put me in your book, you’re going to find every possible way to make me suffer until you finally get it back. And then, all bets are off.”
“That is one-hundred-fucking-percent not what this is about.”
“You told me yourself that you fucking hate me. Two nights ago. As you were fucking me, remember?”
“And you asked me to fuck you like I hated you—”
“That’s the difference between us. You actually do hate me.”
I blink, momentarily thrown off by her words. Judging by the shaken expression that fleets across her face before she subdues it, she is too. “I do not.”
“I don’t believe you, Nolan.”
“Then I guess we’re not that different after all, are we?” I snarl as I crowd her space and stare down at her. “Because you’re determined to believe what you want to, no matter what contrary evidence is staring you in the fucking face.”
She eats the remaining distance, leaving only a thread of space between us. “That’s exactly the kind of shit an enemy would do. Use their opponent’s own words against them. And they certainly wouldn’t say ‘thank you for saving my life.’”
For the briefest moment, her gaze drops to my lips. She’s so close that her chest touches mine with every heaving breath. I want to crash into her, to claim those plump lips. To claim all of her. But she shoves past me with a derisive snort, stopping beside the dead man to press a boot to the back of his head as she works the ax free of his neck. When it finally releases, she notches it over her shoulder, and with a final, cutting glare, she marches away.
“You’re fucking welcome,” she yells as she reaches the garden gate. Middle finger tossed over her shoulder, she disappears. The image of the ribbon bouncing in her ponytail as blood drips from the ax to spatter her shirt with drips of crimson burns through my mind long after the back door of the cottage slams shut.
I look to the body on the ground as the raven swoops down from the garden wall to survey his next meal. “Pretty murder bird,” he says.
But it’s only Harper’s voice I hear.
TOWLINEHarper
I RUN MY HANDS DOWN my skirt, one that has an almost Victorian-era feel despite the hem landing just below my knees, its black-and-white stripes unusual and quirky, perfect for the evening’s festivities. With a short-sleeved black top and black tights and a pair of retro deep red velvet oxford heels, I’m cute as hell. Then I loop a red ribbon around my ponytail. Even cuter. I just wish Nolan could see me in something other than muddy or bloody clothes.
No, I don’t. That’s fucking stupid.
Is it, though?
It feels like the most asinine thing I could ever do would be to put my trust—my real trust, not my tenuous “I have your skinbook and you will do what I want” trust—in a man who has explicitly said that he would hunt the deepest reaches of hell to find me. One who has come here to kill me. Of all the women in the world, I cannot be the one to roll over and say, “Take me now, Murder Daddy.”
Fuck no. Not after what I’ve survived.
