Page 127 of Chasing Your Ghost

Ella wet her lips, guilt still written plainly across her face. With all the excitement and drama the previous afternoon, Asher had forgotten his anger over her inaction and the secrets she’d been keeping.

But betrayal and hurt started to sink their claws into his heart again. He didn’t blame her for Brett’s actions—Riley was right that the man was the only one to blame for those—but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still angry that she’d kept something so big from him.

He understood her reasons better with what Brett had revealed after he’d released Asher from the stasis spell—the spell that had kept him trapped in his own body when he wasn’t wandering around in his spiritual form. But none of what Brett had said changed the fact that Ella had known how to save him, that she’d had the means to find him, and she hadn’t used it.

She was his best friend. He couldn’t understand how the woman he’d known since they were kids could abandon him like that. He’d gone running to her house every time she’d called after one of her nightmares, which weren’t actually nightmares, no matter how late it was and no matter if he’d had other plans.

He’d always had her back. He’d gone above and beyond for her, and when the time came for her to do the same, she hadn’t. And it stung. It burned like acid, and it ached more than the stitches in his arms and legs and the gauze-covered cuts on his chest.

“Ella, I don’t blame you for what Brett did,” Asher told her, his tone not very sympathetic. “But how could you not have told me that you could spiritwalk? Better yet, how could you have waited so long to do it?”

She pressed her lips together and blinked in a way that Asher knew meant she was fighting back tears. “I just…couldn’t.”

“That’s not good enough,” he replied, his hands curling into fists. “I could have died, Ella. Do you realize that? I could have died because you refused to use your ability.”

“I know,” she said, her voice breaking as moisture filled her eyes. “I know, and I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t understand.” He drew in a deep breath, trying to calm down before he said something he couldn’t take back. “Help me understand.”

Ella looked down at the ground, her eyes fixing on a point near the foot of Asher’s bed. “I met Brett when I was eleven,” she began in an unsteady voice. “I realized I could go anywhere I wanted when I spiritwalked, and that day I decided to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in California. I was looking up at the castle when he came right up to me and started speaking to me.”

Asher wondered what Brett had been like back then. It was difficult to imagine him as a child when all Asher knew was the deranged man he’d become.

“He was the only person who’d ever seen me. I expected people walking past to look at him like he was crazy, but then I realized they couldn’t see him either. He asked if we could be friends. The next time I spiritwalked, I focused on that young boy and landed up at his house. He was so happy to see me that I kept going back.”

“How long did that go on?” Riley asked.

“Four or five years.”

Riley ran her hands over her face. “If I’d just mentioned his name in passing, we might have figured out it was him. None of this would have happened.”

Asher bumped her shoulder with his. “Going around telling everyone about every single person you meet isn’t exactly the norm. You couldn’t have known.”

Ella lifted her eyes and met Asher’s gaze. “You obviously don’t remember his name, but do you remember the boy I told you about from my gymnastics class?”

Asher nodded slowly. “Yeah, I remember. You used to hang out with him a lot when I was at football practice.”

“Right. Well, he wasn’t in my gymnastics class. It was Brett.”

His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “You said he was so nice.”

“I thought he was.”

Asher’s lips parted, but he didn’t know what to say. “What happened?” he finally asked.

She breathed out audibly. “I told him I had a crush on someone. If I’d been paying better attention, maybe I would have seen how much he didn’t like that, even though I said the guy didn’t like me back.”

“And that’s when he attacked you?” Asher asked, feeling uncomfortable with where this was going even though he’d asked for and wanted an explanation. What she was telling them felt too private, too intimate.

“No,” she replied, surprising him. “The next time I saw him, he tried to kiss me. I pulled away before he could. I tried to be as nice as possible when I told him I didn’t feel that way about him. I could tell he was upset, but I didn’t realize how upset he was. I made the mistake of going back the next week, thinking we could just forget all about it. That’s when he…did what he did.”

“What did he do?” The question came from Noah, and it managed to sound both gentle and furious.

Ella bit her lip and blinked furiously. It was evident that she was trying to hold back tears, and when she eventually managed to get the words out, they wavered and shook.

“He tried to kiss me again, but when I rejected him, he became more insistent. I told him no, but he must have decided that he didn’t need my permission.” She closed her eyes, and a pair of tears rolled down her cheeks. “He didn’t seem to think he needed my permission to try and take my clothes off either,” she finished in a deceptively calm tone.

Asher felt sick. It was so much worse than he’d thought, and he suddenly hated himself for questioning her loyalty to him. He couldn’t be angry at her anymore, not when what she’d been running from was a nightmare he wouldn’t wish upon the vilest of people. God, she’d only been sixteen when that bastard had assaulted her.

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