Page 51 of Beyond Hate

“I’ve always been me, Otto.” He’d been telling me all along, even when he didn’t believe what I was saying could be true. My fingers came up and my thumb carefully wiped a smear of blood away from the corner of his mouth when I nodded once. Slowly.

“Yeah… yeah, I know.”

And knowing that…

Fuck, knowing that made everything feel different.

It madeusdifferent.It made this life, what it could mean…

Different.

We were caught there, staring at one another as if the weight of the sudden knowledge was enough to drown us both. Thankfully, my mind had belonged to a man with no feelings before I’d crawled into it, so I managed to push myself back from the bed instead of falling into the lost, confused expression trying to draw me under.

“Where are you going?”

He sounded… scared. Unsure.

“To the bathroom. I’m going to get the first aid kit so we can patch you up.”

He’d settled back onto the pillows by the time I came out of the bathroom, his eyes closed and his fingers carefully brushing across the cut on his lip, trailing up to the blood on his brow.

He really was getting my comforter filthy, but I’d worry about that later. I was silent as I made my way across the room, dropping my bag onto the ground beside the bed. And he didn’t open his eyes when I carefully brushed his cheek. London just dropped his hand to the side, as though his little confession had made some kind of bubble of safety between us. It was sweet…

Innocent.

Naïve. I’d told him what kind of a man this body was, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t grasped the full weight of it. Those instincts were still running through my veins. That ambivalence paired with the anger and betrayal I’d felt before I’d died lived and breathed beneath my skin. I could still feel it, was still breathing in the toxic air of that fury.

But…

My hands were careful when I cleaned the cut on his brow, gentle when I taped it closed and moved to wipe the streak of crimson from his split lip. London was a mess, and I was fairlycertain he was going to feel exactly how much of one he was after he slept and his body had time to catch up.

He was still as I cleaned up his face, still as I smoothed my fingers along his ribs one more time and peeled him out of his jeans… and he was still when I pulled back the sheets and carefully climbed into the bed beside him, clicking off the lamp so we were surrounded by the cool relief of darkness.

Second chances—another life where crawling into bed like this didn’t have to mean one of us would end up dead.

I wasn’t sure if I could do it. Everything inside me wanted to wrap my hands around his throat in the dark and choke the life from his body. But when he turned in my arms and buried his face against my neck, and I felt his shoulders gently start to shake with silent tears… my arms tightened around him automatically.

I’d never believed in second chances, but with London’s warmth trying to melt the ice in my chest and his body slowly relaxing as exhaustion overtook him, soft sniffles still occasionally making him nuzzle closer… I realized for the first time, I wanted to.

Believing in Nikki had gotten me killed before… but a part of me wondered if trusting London could be the thing that saved us both.

Chapter 19

London

Thingsdriftedinandout after that. There were nightmares where Hudson had me pinned down, but every time I woke up, Otto was there. He’d stopped sneaking between the sheets while I was asleep… he was just there when I woke up, there when I told him I was too tired and I didn’twantto wake up.

He was there to bring me breakfast, and there to feed me painkillers that left me sliding back into unconsciousness. I wasn’t sure how much time passed like that, but when I finally woke up with my head clear, it took me a few minutes to realize there was something wrong.

The clinking sound of metal against metal drew my brows together.

“What’s going on?”

Otto was still there beside me, and his eyes swept my frame, landing on my wrists… which were cuffed to the bed above my head.

“I need to go out.” He offered the explanation like it made any sense. When I stared at him, he lifted one shoulder in a shrug,like what he was doing was the most normal thing in the world. “I want to make sure you don’t go anywhere.”

“Otto—”

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