Page 39 of Say You're Mine

But another part of me - fragile, battered, but still stubbornly clinging to hope - whispers that she IS real. That our bond is stronger than Faulkner's depraved machinations. That her love is the one pure thing left in my hollowed-out existence.

I don't know anything anymore. What's real, what's illusion, where the borders are between my fractured psyche and the physical world that is my waking nightmare. But in the end...it doesn't matter.

Real or not, phantom or flesh, I'll cling to Cara. To the memory of her smile, her eyes, the sweet rightness of her in my arms. I'll cup that sputtering flame of desperate hope in my mind's hands and breathe on it with my dying will.

Because it's all I have left. The only thing that might see me through this abyss without losing the last ragged shreds of Juniper Deveaux.

So I'll endure. I'll choke on tears and bile and the screams I dare not voice. I'll wade through seas of blood and deception and shattered mirror selves. I'll walk through the flames of Faulkner's mind-rape and let them scorch me to the bone.

And I will hold the image of Cara in my heart like a talisman, like a prayer. Cara, my angel, my center, my last fraying lifeline to a world beyond purgatory.

I'll stagger through Hell and beyond, until I can drag my broken, burning body into her arms. Until I can bury my face in her hair, breathe her in, beg her to never let me go.

Or until I shatter into a million razor-edged pieces, too far gone to ever be pieced back together into something resembling a man.

Please, Cara. Please be real. Find me. Save me. From the demons who torment my flesh...and the far worse ones devouring my mind.

You're my only hope, the only light in a world gone black as a grave.

Don't let me be lost. Don't let me forget.

My love. My heart.

My salvation.

Chapter twelve

Cara

The phone slips from my numb fingers, clattering to the floor in a discordant symphony of plastic on hardwood. For a moment, I can only stare at it, my vision blurring with unshed tears, my heart a leaden weight in my chest.

June's voice, so familiar and yet so alien, echoes in my mind. The venom, the vitriol, the sheer, unfiltered hatred in his words... it's like a knife to the gut, a brutal, twisting agony that steals the breath from my lungs.

"What have they done to you?" I whisper, a broken plea to the uncaring universe. "What have those monsters done to the man I love?"

I sink to my knees, uncaring of the cold, unyielding floor beneath me. My hands shake as I press them to my belly, feeling the tiny flutter of life within. Our child. Our hope. The only piece of June I have left.

A sob wrenches free from my throat, raw and jagged as broken glass. It echoes in the emptiness of the room, the emptiness inside me where June's love used to live. I've never felt so alone, so utterly bereft. Not even when I stood at my father's graveside, watching them lower his casket into the unforgiving earth.

This is a different kind of loss, a different breed of grief. Because June isn't gone, not really. He's still out there, still breathing, his heart still beating in tandem with mine. But the man I spoke to on the phone, the man who snarled such poisonous words in a twisted mockery of my love's voice...

That's not my June. That's not the gentle, fiercely protective soul who held me close and whispered sweet everythings against my skin. That's not the man who fought against his own demons, his own dark legacy, to build a life with me.

No, that creature is something else entirely. A shell, a husk, a broken, bleeding thing that Faulkner and Elaine have hollowed out and filled with their spite and their malice.

The thought sends a fresh wave of anguish crashing over me, so intense it steals my breath. I curl in on myself, arms wrapped tight around the swell of my stomach, as if I could shield our child from the horrors of the world through sheer force of will.

But even as despair threatens to drag me under, a small, stubborn ember flares to life in my chest. A spark of defiance, of determination, of pure, unadulterated rage at the people who have dared to lay their filthy hands on the man I love.

They think they've won. They think they've broken him, shattered him beyond repair. But they don't know June like I do. They don't understand the depths of his strength, the iron core of resilience that runs through him like a seam of purest steel.

He's still in there. My June, my heart, the father of my child. Beneath the layers of torment and manipulation, beneath the poison they've dripped into his ear and the lies they've carved into his skin...

He endures. He fights. He clings to the memory of us, the promise of the life we've dreamed of building together.

And if he can hold on, if he can keep that flame alive in the darkest of hells...

Then so can I.

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