Page 107 of Visions of Darkness

We just have to get away.

It is going to be fine.

It is going to be fine.

It has to be.

I jumped when fingers barely brushed over my upper arm.

Fire and heat.

“Are you okay?” Pax’s words were shards. Sharp enough to cut.

Gulping, I could barely nod. “Yes. Are you?”

I finally allowed myself to glance at him. The horror I’d been feeling left me on a rasp. “Oh my God, Pax.”

I hadn’t been able to look at him once he’d come downstairs. My attention had been chained to the man who’d fallen to the ground six feet from the car. Unable to believe that it had happened.

He was dead.

Maybe most of all was knowing one misstep and it could have turned out completely differently. He could have gotten to me, or he could have gotten to Pax.

My sight blurred with the truth that it could have been my Nol who’d fallen over the railing.

It could have been him.

And maybe that was why I hadn’t been able to look—because I was terrified for Pax. The fight he was embroiled in to protect me. What he was sacrificing. The disaster he was getting himself into. The danger he was facing.

For me.

For me.

He was doing it for me.

And the reality of that came crashing down as I finally took him in.

Blood ran in a web of rivulets down his face, and there was a giant smear on his forehead.

It streaked from somewhere near his temple, and there was a gash that continued to pour blood from his right upper cheek. Another was busted open at the edge of his lip.

Through it, gray eyes stared back, wild and untamed. An inferno of white flames. “It’s not me I’m concerned about, Aria.”

“You’re hurt,” I choked out.

“I’m fine.” His teeth ground, and he glanced over his shoulder to peer into the night that gathered behind us. Trees enclosed the road on both sides, standing tall like patrols as the small town where we’d stopped disappeared into the nothingness, the murky moonlight above us a cold winter glow.

He heaved a sigh when he flipped back around to face forward in his seat, and he lifted the hem of his shirt and rubbed it over his facelike it might stand the chance of wiping away the evidence of what had happened.

“Fuck,” he breathed once he let his shirt go.

“He’s dead.” I didn’t even phrase it as a question. I was already sure. Still, it poured out of me like the toppling of a vat filled with disbelief.

Pax ran the back of his hand over his mouth as if he could wipe away the bad taste. “Yeah, Aria. He’s dead.”

A tremor rocked me. An earthquake that shattered through the shaky foundation I’d been standing on. Bile clogged my throat.

A single tear got free and slipped down my cheek.

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