Page 91 of Sunflower

“Christ.” Running his hands through his hair, Koby nervously swallowed enough to make his Adam’s apple jerk. “Let’s get to work, then.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Callum

Fouryearsago…

The skyscrapers of New York loomed large over me, making me feel like the miniscule cockroach that I was as I walked down the street to the jewelry store that I’d found online last night.

The past twenty-four hours had completely turned my world upside down, and I felt like the heel of fate was set to crush me under the weight of the expectation of things still to come.

Just like a cockroach.

Not looking where he was going, a man walking in the opposite direction bumped hard into me, his exposed forearm brushing against my bare hand.

“Watch where you’re fucking going!” he snarled angrily out loud, but in his head, he fretted,“—I’m sure I put that report on his desk—”

I winced at the two competing moods, my fingers curling into a fist to avoid further contact with strangers. I’d been gaining so much more control over my mental barriers over the pastfew years that I’d gotten used to not having to wearing gloves anymore, but ever since I’d shakenhishand, all the protections I’d methodically built up had shattered and were now lying in pieces around my tortured mind.

Did I still have my old pair of gloves hidden away in my dorm room? Or did I need to buy a new pair? Hopefully, I wouldn’t need to wear them for long. There was no way I could go back to wearing them constantly, like I had when I was younger. I needed to focus; rebuild my mental fortress to prevent a repeat ofthat.

My heart stuttered at the thought ofhim, the confusion in his eyes as I’d gripped his hand so hard that I swear his bones ground together. Of course, Mam hadn’t told him about what we could do. No wonder he’d been confused out of his poor mind.

She hadn’t told him by then, at least. She’d told me last night before I’d left that she and Barry, his dad, had explained everything to him after I’d fled to my room like the Devil himself was after me.

In a way, I supposed he was.

Joey.

My own personal devil come to torment me with visions of the future.

God damn it.Why?

I’dneverhad a vision of the future before. It wasn’t possible. Not until I’d held his hand in greeting, something I’d done with other people hundreds of times before and had never had a single issue. Very occasionally, I’d get a glimpse into the other person’s current state of mind, but that just meant that I had to shore up my mental defenses again. Mam’s old boss, George, had trained me well over the years, and he’d warned me that no defense was impenetrable. Some people simplytalkedlouder than others, and I’d need to compensate accordingly as and when I met them.

But with Joey… It was like he’d obliterated every single guard I’d created over the past decade into dust, all for it to be blown away by the whistling cyclone that was left of my mind.

Sitting down opposite him at dinner last night was torture. Literal torture.

Every single time I looked at him, my body boiled in a murky soup of rage that he’d so easily gotten past my defenses and desire from what I’d seen.

I wasn’t angry athim. How could I be? It wasn’thisfault that he’d triggered an evolution of my abilities. No, I was angry, becauseno-onein my family had thought to warn me that just maybe, possibly, perhaps there might be a teensy-tiny chance that my powers could maybe, possibly, perhaps evolve in a frightening new direction.

As far as I knew, everyone in my family that had psychic abilities could only listen in to other people when they touched themorread an item’s history by touching it. Some lucky members of the family, like my mam and me, could do both.

But no-one, at least those of us who were currently alive, had the ability to see the future. There were rules in place to stop that from ever happening.

That was George and his family’s purview, not ours.

I’d fobbed Mam off easily enough when she’d come up to see me before dinner, assuming that I’d heard something in Joey’s head that I’d been shocked over.

To be fair, she wasn’tthatfar wrong.

She’d asked me if it was anything that she might need to approach Barry over, like school issues, drugs, or alcohol, but once I assured her it wasn’t anything like that, she’d nodded and basically told me to suck it up and strengthen my defenses.

And I tried. I tried so damn hard. Thank fuck I hadn’t told her how, after a single touch, he’d obliterated them. She would havefreaked even more than she did later when I told her what I’d seen.

But then I sat opposite him at dinner… and every time I looked at him, I was overwhelmed with the need to hug him, kiss him, protect him, andlove himjust like I’d seen in my vision of our future.

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