Page 207 of Pretty Little Lies

I gasp, clasping onto his wrist for relief, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t wish to give me any. Torin just wants me to feel how his heart is breaking. How he believes me to have taken from him when it’s not like that at all.

“Then why did he try to get you to go with him?” Torin leers. “You’re telling me that my brother was trying to off you because you didn’t want to go with him?”

“It was to get away from Matteo.”

“Bullshit.”

“Itwas.”

“Yeah…” he scoffs, and I feel the pad of his thumb grazing along the soft dip of my throat. “From the sounds of it, he wanted you so fucking bad, Bay. Maybe he would’ve had you if you hadn’t ended him.”

“I—”

“I would’ve had to watch you from afar…” He averts his dark gaze to the wall. “Knowing that you were fucking my brother. But that would’ve been okay if he were alive. I would’ve still protected you. You still would’ve meant something to me.”

“He didn’t want me,” I argue back. “He wanted the idea of me. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I didn’t want Judah to die.”

Torin pulls my body slightly from the door and slams it right into the unforgiving surface. My head slams into it next, but I welcome the pain because it reminds me of what’s happening and what I have to protect. “Shut the fuck up.Shutup.”

It’s then that it comes full force.

I can see it all in black and white, even those Torin’s eyes are what set it all off.

He looks just like him.

Those mocha-cinnamon mixed browns match his facial features and the boyish expression he always holds. That bad boy,would-fuck-you-to-sleepvibe.

“It’s the only way,” Judah whispers before his large palms and fingers tightly wrap around my throat. “I promise I’ll try to do it as quickly as possible.”

He was, at the time, the most attractive man I had ever met in my life. And what scares me the most is that I see the same emerging darkness roam into Torin’s eyes.

He wants to kill me.

Just like his brother wanted to.

“I didn’t want you to bleed,” he whispers, almost sounding sorry for what he’s about to do. His full weight digs my body into the soft dirty. His face becoming a faded picture in my vision. “I’m so sorry, Bay. Please know…please know how much you mean to me. I know it didn’t seem like it, I know I slutted around, but I thought it was for the best. I’ve wanted you since day one.”

“I’m sorry.” The two words come out choked as Torin’s ongoing glare beats and throttles me into a hurricane full of guilt. “He was trying to kill me.”

“I didn’t see that.”

“Judah,” I implore weakly.

Please stop.

“I’m sorry,” Judah says again. “Please…know how much, Bay.”

“See, what?” I ask, holding Torin’s heated browns.

“Him trying to hurt you. I saw the video, Bay. I saw and heard what you did. You took from me. You took my fucking brother. He was coming to get me. He was going to strip me away from Emilio.”

“Why’d you have to do that, Bay?” Judah cajoles, snatching up my left wrist and holding it over my head. I just headbutted him and he looks furious if he didn’t before. “Why does everyone not want me?”

I don’t care. He doesn’t either.

He wants to murder me in the middle of the woods and take me away from Dad and my sisters.

My knife appears, and that’s when all of Judah’s mercy disappears.

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