Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Knox’s eyes went there. “That wasn’t anger.”
“Then what was it?” I asked, my voice a low rasp.
He didn’t answer.
His gaze bore into me, scraped over my skin, ripping pieces of it away until I was nothing but a trembling pile of bones.
Then he walked into the forest, leaving me alone.
Was it smart, following the seething demon into the forest?
He’d stalked off there because he hadn’t wanted to be around me. Hadn’t wanted to be around the feelings we were drenched in when we were in each other’s presence.
Because he wanted to continue to hide his secrets and his true feelings.
No, it wasn’t smart, following him.
Maybe if I’d gone into the cabin and created some distance between us, it would’ve stayed there. The tension between us might have remained tension, coiled so it never released. Like a bomb, long buried, ready to explode but keeping the world tentatively safe under layers of soil and rock.
I had always made smart decisions when it came to men—Daisy had pointed that out earlier. Those smart decisions landed me here anyway. In the place I loved so much. With Knox. I couldn’t help but think that was the universe urging me toward him.
Or maybe it was the universe testing me, to see if I was like my mother.
I didn’t marinate too much on that thought.
Instead, I followed him into the forest.
If it was a test, I failed.
He wasn’t hard to find.
He wasn’t trying to hide.
Predators didn’t need to hide.
And I knew he heard me approach.
“I was broken. Early on.”
His back was to me and stayed to me while he spoke.
I wanted to see his face, desperately, but something told me whatever he was about to say was too painful for him to speak while facing me.
So I stood. Waiting.
“My mother, if you could call her that, wanted a man. She had two sons, but that didn’t matter to her.”
I could feel the scorn in his voice. The poisonous, unyielding hatred. It almost choked him. An inkling of why he’d had such a visceral opinion of my own mother.
“When she found someone she thought was good for her, she ignored what he did to us.”
My stomach pitted as I heard in his voice agony that no one should have to carry. I had an inkling of what he meant, and it squeezed my heart.
“I like to think she didn’t know he was a child molester when she married him,” he continued, speaking my greatest fear. “I’ll be generous for her, but she was also so fucking desperate that he could’ve told her that on her wedding night, and she would’ve stayed. Not that the how of it matters. It mattered that it happened.”
He turned then, and as much as I’d been longing for his eyes, I wished he would’ve stayed facing away from me so I didn’t see the void in his gaze.
There was no pain, there was no anger, no grief. Nothing but a never-ending black hole of coldness that he’d created to keep him safe from it all.
“I knew there was something off with him from the moment I met him.” His voice was a flat monotone, words so heavy I was surprised they didn’t drill me chest-deep into the earth. “So I stayed up that night, the first night he was in the house as our stepfather.” He laughed. I’d never heard him laugh before. Not that I would ever truly call the sound he made a laugh. I’d never heard a sound so horrible. So chilling. It echoed through the forest.
“He didn’t even bother to wait,” he continued. “He went for my brother first.” He stopped speaking, standing stock-still. I would’ve thought he turned to stone right there and then had his hand not fisted and his body quaked.
Seeing him shuddering was akin to seeing a skyscraper tremble. You were so used to them standing tall and strong that you forgot they could fall too. And if they did, the wreckage was unimaginable.
“My brother was younger. He preferred them younger. But I managed to avert most of his attention away from him. When I could.”
The handful of sentences held decades’ worth of meaning. Of pain. Of a kind of evil I couldn’t even digest. Logically, I knew terrible things like this happened in the world. Sickening things. But I had never let myself think too much on it. I worked with children. Every day, I saw the brightness in them. The purity. The innocence. What a treasure they were.
And to think a human could sully something like that in such a disgusting way sent my blood curdling. My heart splintered in my chest for Knox.
He was explaining how he averted a pedophile’s attention in order to save his brother the trauma.
“How old were you?” I barely resisted the urge to vomit in the dirt beside me.