Page 83 of Beyond Hate

And when he woke from those dreams, I pressed him into the sheets and took him apart in all the ways that made his mind drift to anywhere other than the places inside him that still ached.

It wasn’t exactly therapy, but we’d finally settled down in a new place, in the middle of some nowhere town in Texas with a house on lots of land. We could worry about things like therapy now that he had a name that wouldn’t run up any alarm bells.

It wasn’t like we’d really left any traces of what had happened. It wasn’t exactly easy, but between the pictures of the murder victims surrounding him, and the fact that there was a dead woman in the room with him who’d been constantly calling him and hadpictureson her phone of the dead man who’d attacked London… I was pretty sure I’d done a good enough job framing Renn as the killer that no one was going to question us.

If they ever found Hudson’s body, they’d probably blame that on him too.

It meant when we disappeared a few months later, once things had calmed down, I wasn’treallyworried about anyone questioning us.

I still bought us both new names, a new life, and a new place to live so far away from everything that had happened that even though he did wake up with nightmares, he was quick to settle when he realized where he was.

With me.

He was mine to break, mine to put back together again. And as my eyes swept over his sleeping figure, soft and innocent in the bed beside me… I realized maybe that was the point of all of this.

All the pain I went through, the suffering. What Nikki had done, or what he hadn’t done. I didn’t have answers, and I didn’t need them. Throwing that journal into the fire had been both the hardest and easiest thing I’d ever done—I gave up the answers tying me to the past for the possibility of the only future I’d ever wanted.

All I needed was London, and I would have lived through a thousand lives full of pain to have him at my side.

“Otto?” His voice came out soft and sweet, and I settled back onto the bed, sliding my arm around his waist. The motion immediately made him relax—I wasn’t even sure if he was completely awake. “Love you…” he murmured, and the words tingled against my skin.

Love.

I’d questioned if I’d ever really felt it. I knew how to hate, and I never thought there was anything beyond that.

But with London…

“I love you too. Go back to sleep, rabbit.” He’d already settled into my arms, and when I dropped my head and buried my nose against his hair, I let myself drift.

With London, there was infinity chasing into forever, built on love and hate. It was a fate I was more than willing to fight to keep.

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