Page 105 of Torn In Two

Hayley Jade napped peacefully in the car, zero idea of what was going on outside it, as Grayson hauled Kyle to his feet and dragged him back up the beach.

With every step they drew closer, my head swirled with everything I wanted to say. Everything I wanted to scream.

But when Kyle stood in front of me, forced in place by the vicious grip Grayson had on his arm, words failed me.

I slapped my palm across Kyle’s face with all the strength and anger that had been building for all the years Josiah had kept me down. The rage was set free, every hateful feeling exploding from inside me, culminating in the blow I’d delivered to Josiah’s disciple.

Kyle’s head jerked to the side, Grayson never easing up for a second, despite the way Kyle’s shoulder seemed ready to pop right out of its socket.

Good.

I hoped it hurt.

I hoped it hurt even half as much as the pain he’d caused my sister.

“How could you?” I asked Kyle eventually, my voice so broken I barely recognized it. “She thought you were her friend.”

To my surprise, when Kyle finally lifted his head to look at me, it was with tears in his eyes. “I was her friend!”

My face screwed up in disbelief. “How can you say that, after what you did? You killed her! You put a cord around her neck and pulled it tight while she struggled to breathe!”

His eyes widened. “I didn’t! Please, Kara. You have to believe me. I didn’t hurt Alice. I would never. I was in love with her! I still am! Even though she’s…”

I scoffed, but his words hit a chord inside me, and I remembered the way he’d gazed at her that day we’d escaped. It had been sweet. Tender. So full of awe and amazement at everything she said and did.

So quickly that sweetness had turned to malice.

“So what?” I accused. “She danced with someone else, and you got jealous? Or was it just you’re so ridiculously brainwashed by Josiah that when he told you to kill her, you did it anyway? Killed the woman you loved because you were too weak and gutless to stand up to him?”

Kyle shook his head miserably, wincing when Grayson yanked his arm again. “I haven’t talked to Josiah’s since we left. I swear it, Kara. I didn’t kill your sister. I wanted a life with her. I was going to marry her, if she would have me. That’s why I left with you. I would have waited. Waited through as many men as she wanted to dance with, or date, or whatever she wanted. I would have waited for her for a hundred years if that’s what it took for her to be ready.”

I paused at the depth of anguish in his voice. At the pain in his eyes.

At the truth I heard in his words.

For the first time in weeks, I considered that maybe I was wrong.

“Why did you run then?” Grayson asked gruffly. “If you were so innocent?”

“I was scared,” Kyle practically whispered, every inch the man-child he was at nineteen. “I lost track of her in the club. When I couldn’t find her, I went up and down the other clubs searching for her, and then eventually I went back to the truck, assuming she’d come back when she was done partying.”

A tear slipped down my cheek. “She wasn’t partying.”

Kyle nodded miserably. “I know that now. I fell asleep in the truck waiting for her. When I woke up, the entire block was crawling with cops. I asked some people what was going on, and they said there’d been a body found, right outside that first club we’d been at…”

“And you knew it was her,” I said softly.

“I didn’t want it to be.” His pain ate up his words, agony in every one. “So I fought my way to the front of the crowd, praying she’d just gone home with someone else because even knowing she was with another man would have been a relief.”

“But she wasn’t,” I filled in for him. “It was her, dead in that alley behind the club.”

He nodded miserably. “I watched them put her body into a bag.”

The words gutted me, my brain conjuring up images of what that must have looked like. Bitterness crept onto my tongue. “And then you ran.” I knew the story from there.

Regrets filled Kyle’s eyes. “I knew the cops would blame me, the same way you did. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t go back to Ethereal Eden. Josiah would kill me on sight for helping you leave. But I had nowhere else to go. My parents have been calling me nonstop since it happened. I haven’t answered, but their voicemails are frantic, asking me why the cops keep coming to their home, searching through all my belongings. I want to talk to them so badly, but I don’t want them to have to lie for me either.”

My heart squeezed at the lost-little-boy expression on his face. He was barely a man. Not even old enough to drink. The terror in his eyes and the tremble in his bottom lip reminded me of the way Hayley Jade had looked when we’d escaped.

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