Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 112762 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 564(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 376(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112762 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 564(@200wpm)___ 451(@250wpm)___ 376(@300wpm)
None of it compared to grief.
“My big sister.” My voice was quiet, words thick with memories. “We were close. She even opted to stay at home and attend Edinburgh Uni. When I was sixteen, she was twenty and had just finished up her second year at university. She was premed.” Intelligent and caring. And funny. Christ, she’d made me laugh. But I was a different person then. “She started seeing this guy who was older. His name was Tommy Dingwall. My parents didn’t like him. Neither did I. He was always touching her inappropriately in front of me. Pawing at her. I hated the way he looked at her, like she was a pet he owned. I had a feeling something was going on that I didn’t know about because Iona was arguing with my mum a lot. But I was focused on my own stuff, you know. I wasn’t paying enough attention.
“Then one day, I cut school because I was in the middle of this video game and I’d rather be playing that than sitting in a geography class.”
Sloane subconsciously leaned closer, as if she could hear that my heart rate had sped up.
“I knew Mum wouldn’t be home because she went to painting class every week on that afternoon. But when I got to the house, I could hear Iona yelling at someone upstairs. Then I heard Tommy’s voice.” I exhaled shakily as the memory flooded over me. “Then … her scream.”
Sloane covered her mouth as if she knew what was coming.
“I raced upstairs and the bedroom door was blocked. So I rammed against it, hearing her …” Emotion threatened to choke me. “Hearing her scream my name for help.”
“Walker.” Fresh tears slipped down Sloane’s cheeks.
“I got in. He’d shoved her dresser across the door. But he … he came at me as soon as I slipped into the room. I felt a burning pain in my gut, and I looked down and saw he’d stabbed me.”
Her breath caught. “The scar on your stomach.”
I nodded. “I tried to attack him, but I was losing consciousness. The last thing I remembered was Iona begging him to help me.” My breath shuddered as I dropped my gaze to the floor.
“Walker, if this is too much …”
I shook my head. Determined to tell her. She wanted all of me? Well, this was it. “I came to when the paramedics lifted me onto a stretcher … and Iona on her bedroom floor … dead. He’d cut her throat.”
Sloane cried silently.
“He killed her while I was in the room. And I couldn’t save her.” I laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. “The first thing my dad said to me when I woke up out of surgery was that I failed him. I failed her. He hated me for not saving her.”
“No.” Sloane launched out of her chair and fell on her knees at my feet. She reached for my face, and I leaned into her touch, only then realizing there were fucking tears on my cheeks. She wiped at them, eyes blazing. “You were a boy and you tried. It was no one’s fault but the sick bastard who killed Iona. He almost killed you.”
With a sob, she clambered onto my lap and I pulled her close, tight, burying my face in her chest as she held me. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said over and over. “You didn’t fail her. You didn’t fail me.”
Thirty-Nine
SLOANE
I thought the only person whose pain I could feel as if it were my own was Callie’s. But I was wrong. In that room, holding Walker to me as he fought back tears, I felt his grief squeeze around my heart and throat. I wanted to sob for days. Instead, I trembled with the tension of holding it back in order to be strong for him.
All the things this big, capable, brave man had seen in his lifetime, and nothing could scar him more deeply than his sister’s murder. How could it? No wonder he’d been able to deal with everything else life threw at him. If he could survive that, he could survive anything.
Slowly, Walker’s shaking eased, and he lifted his head from my chest to meet my gaze. The tortured look in his eyes would haunt me forever. I would give anything to change the past for him, to take away this pain.
I brushed my fingers down his cheek, his beard rasping against my palm as he leaned into my touch.
“Thank you for telling me.”
His arms tightened around me.
“You should know that knowing this about you only makes me more amazed at everything you’ve become, despite losing Iona that way.” Walker Ironside was a fierce protector of women, and maybe he always would have been if life had gone a different way, but there was no doubt in my mind that his sister’s death had forged that fierceness. The reminder that his father had blamed him caused a rage to simmer low in my gut. “And your father was wrong.”