Page 143 of Visions of Darkness

Aria looked at me then, her chin quivering as she lifted it. “I asked if I could use her phone.”

Alarm banged through my insides, and my fingers dug deeper into her leg, holding on, too.

Trembles rolled through her as she swallowed, and she looked at me point-blank when she admitted, “I called them, Pax, because Iknew. I knew I wasn’t hallucinating. I knew I wasn’t losing my grip on reality. I knew that it was real.”

She inhaled a shaky breath. The cut on the edge of her lip tweaked down at the side. “My mother answered. She was distraught, begging me to tell her where I was, while I begged her to go to my grandmother’s with my sister and brothers. I tried to warn her. I tried to warn her. A second later, my father ripped the phone from her.”

The same way as that bastard had done when she’d called them the first morning.

Disquiet gusted.

I’d always hated her father, my gut warning me he’d be a part of her demise.

“I could hear it, Pax ... I could hear it in his voice. I think he’s fully succumbed. I think my mom and my siblings are in danger. I have to go back.”

In a flash, both my hands were cupping her face. Fear ate me alive. “You can’t, Aria. If this is true? If it has gotten to him? Then it did it as a way to get to you. It’s a trap.”

Tears streaked hot down her unforgettable face, the beauty of her devastating. The one who was written in my dreams and carved in my soul.

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t turn my back on them.”

“And I can’t risk you.” My words quaked in emphasis. “There has to be another way. Some way to stop this. I can’t just take you back there and lay you at that monster’s feet.”

“I love them.”

“I know you do. I know you do.” My gut knotted in fear, and I leaned in closer to her until our air was getting mixed and she was the only thing I was breathing. “But I have to protect you. And if you’re hearing them ... in the day like this?”

How was any of this possible? The binding while awake was difficult enough to process. But at least she was right there, next to the person. I could almost wrap my head around it.

But this?

Aria was so much more than anything I could imagine.

Her power greater than anything any of us had ever known.

“We need to find out why this is happening to you.” So much shit had happened the last two days that we hadn’t been able to research more. Maria Lewis’s name beat through my mind. I was reticent to trust, but at this point, I couldn’t shun any chance of figuring out more.

I shifted and took both her hands she still had fisted in her sweater, prying them away. I pulled them up close to my chest. “We have to find out how these hands can reach out and bind the darkness.”

My lips found their way to her temple. “How this mind can see, can hear, can feel the things that it shouldn’t. You are special, Aria. So fucking special. And they want to snuff that out, and I can’t let them.”

I inhaled, filling my aching lungs with the scent of pineapple and coconut, wishing with all of me for that fantasy of the two of us on a secluded beach, so far removed that it would be impossible for anyone to get to her.

Not in the day and not in the night.

“How?” she begged. “How, when I can feel they’re running out of time?”

“Not sure, but I think we start with Maria Lewis.”

My forehead was against hers, the two of us rocking.

“Somehow we’ll find answers.” I pried myself back, holding the side of her face and brushing my thumb over her cheek.

In my periphery, I took note of a man walking by the front of my car, though he had his hands in his pockets as he casually strolled by.

In an instant, I was hit with the disturbance that radiated from Aria.

“What’s wrong?” It shot from my mouth.

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