Page 111 of Possess Me! (I Want You To)

Was all of him that sensitive?

I definitely wanted to find that out ASAP. For science. Of course.

Buuuut there were more pressing concerns at hand. Like the whole ghosts are rare enough a guy is hunting us thing. Or the a murderous psychopath is the one who made me thing. Despite being an idiot, I was pretty sure there was more to that story. “So…” I added another petal to the sunflower I was sketching. “You gonna tell me how…you know…all of ‘this’ happened?”

I thought I’d have to fight him for answers.

But he surprised me.

“So, I’m a ghost,” Prudence started, his voice playfully teasing, a clear reference to the statement I’d made when we’d first started our game of questions. I snorted. “I was framed as an accomplice for murder when I was twenty.”

I blinked, paused, then continued drawing. Hopefully my patience would coax more answers out of him.

“I didn’t do it, in case you were wondering.” Prudence’s voice sounded distant. Detached. Like he was relaying information about someone else and not himself. “The woman who did was psychotic. She’d planned it all out, every last bit.”

“Lydia?” He’d told me briefly about her earlier. Sadistic bitch. I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle seeing her in a few days without wanting to strangle her for what she’d put him through. This though—the origin of all of this—was new to me. As much as I’d wanted to ask earlier, I’d held my tongue patiently for this exact moment. “The woman that made you.”

“Yes.”

“Who killed you?” I asked, keeping my tone light as I moved on to his knuckles, scrubbing out the letters and tracing over them with a flourish. Prudence shifted uncomfortably for a second, and I almost retracted my question—but like earlier, I figured he probably needed to talk to someone about this more than I needed to hear it.

When I finished with his hand, he immediately gave me the other one. The wind ruffled my hair as I latched on and started the process all over again, trailing letters across his knuckles as I waited patiently for him to speak. “The council—the supernatural government that runs sanctuaries like my hometown—killed me to reset the balance.”

“Because they thought you’d done it?”

“Because they thought I’d helped.”

It was both baffling and terrifying that there was an entire fucking hidden government for the supernatural that I didn’t know about. What else was out there? Secret prisons, spooky creatures, supernatural sanctuaries parading as regular towns and governments—I shook away the thoughts with a shudder, waiting for him to speak again.

When he didn’t, I asked another question. “How?”

Maybe it was insensitive to ask—but I had no way of knowing that, so I asked anyway. Curiosity was a bitch, but I was bitchier.

“Lethal injection.”

“No beheading?”

Prudence snorted in amusement, and immediately my belly filled with butterflies. I liked making him laugh. My marker skittered across his skin a third time, and he jerked a little in my grip, then settled. His breath puffed along the sensitive shell of my ear as I forced my lungs to work again and began adding flowers to his bicep. “No, beheading,” he repeated. “My death was humane. As humane as murder can be, anyway.”

“I bet they felt real stupid when they realized you were innocent.” That was the understatement of the century, but still.

I jumped when the friendly owl hooted again, startling a little laugh from my lips. This was spooky shit. All of it. I couldn’t believe how casually we were talking about murder—like it was an everyday occurrence as common as coffee drinking, or riding a bus.

But then again, we’d literally killed someone today, so—

Maybe this conversation wasn’t that far-fetched.

I knew I should feel bad, but I didn’t.

What I’d said to Prudence earlier was true. It had been him, or us. And there had truly been no choice. It would’ve always been us. Always.

“I don’t care whether or not they felt bad,” Prudence grunted. “Dying never really mattered to me.” I listened carefully because I got the feeling he was about to admit something incredibly personal, and his voice was so quiet I worried that if I so much as breathed, I’d spook him into silence. “After Amanda was killed, I didn’t have much to live for anyway.”

I knew he hadn’t been close to his family. He’d explained earlier the disassociation he felt when they were near. The way they’d attached themselves to him out of loyalty, even though he felt as though sometimes they were strangers. He loved them, true. In the only way he was capable of loving. But he didn’t…live for them. He couldn’t. I knew that now.

Amanda had meant a lot to him.

She’d taught him to look forward to the future.

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