Page 235 of Shadowblood Souls
Something in my brain stalls. I can’t fully process what I’m seeing until he angles the blade to dig it in.
A cry breaks from my throat. I throw myself forward and grab his wrists just as blood starts to spring from his skin.
My hands look tiny against his bulging muscles, but the supernatural might in me gives me the strength to wrench his knife hand away from his forearm.
More blood is flowing from the cut he managed to make before I sprang in. Another pained sound hitches out of me, and I press my palm against it.
“We need Dom.”
I suck in a breath to call for our healer, but Jacob shakes his head.
“No. I hurt you. Ipoisonedyou with this fucking arm. I don’t deserve to keep it.”
He means it. Every word propels from his lips with the same fierce resolve I used to hear when he accused me of murdering Griffin.
He barrels onward. “I can’t change what happened, but I can show you it’s over. I can pay the price. I?—”
“Not like this,” I break in. “Never like this, Jacob.”
I squeeze his arm harder. Only a little blood is streaking out from beneath my hand now—I don’t think he’d managed to cut very deep yet—but my heart still aches to see it.
Jacob stares down at me like he can’t quite believe I’m refusing him. When the tears burning behind my eyes brim over, he flinches.
With a shudder of his fingers, the knife thumps to the floor. His legs give.
He slumps to the floor, his head tipping forward to lean against the edge of the bed by my knees. But he doesn’t pull his arm away from me.
“I hurt you so badly,” he mumbles. “I can’t take it back. I can’t make it better. I don’t know how to do this right.”
My throat closes up. I keep clutching on to his forearm, but I have no idea what to say.
The boy in front of me seems so lost and alone, but he’s already pushed me so far away that I don’t know if I could ever reach him.
But I don’t want to lose him. Whatever we still have, however much all our history before the past few weeks matters, that one fact resonates through me beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“I don’t know either,” I say, my voice coming out rough. “But you have to be here, in one piece, to do it.”
He inhales with a hiss through his teeth. “What if I’m never going to be in one piece the way I was again?”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
Jacob is silent for a stretch before he speaks again. “I wasn’t lying when I said I died that day, even if it wasn’t you who killed me. When I saw Griffin fall on that screen, when I knew he was gone… It was my fucking fault. I should have taken lead. I shouldn’t have let him?—”
He cuts himself off with a strangled sound.
My other hand drifts over as if of its own accord to rest on the rumpled strands of his hair. My tentative touch seems to give him the resolve to go on.
“Everything was wrong, and there wasn’t anything I could do. I just wanted to be gone too. There wasn’t any point. The only thing… The only thing I felt other than empty was rage at the pricks who shot him down. If I hadn’t known I might still get to pay them back, I would have slit my own fucking throat four years ago.”
Fresh tears prickle in my eyes. “What about the other guys? You still had them.”
Jacob manages a shrug in his slouched position. “I look out for them. I’m not letting them fall if I can help it. Because that’s what we do for each other. I don’t—there’s nothinginme—I couldn’t manage to be a brother properly so I sure as hell can’t handle being a friend.”
He lifts his head to gaze up at me. “Until I watched you racing toward that train, and I—I cared, so fucking much, and I was terrified and ashamed and I wanted so many things that I haven’t even thought about in years. But I’m not fixed. It’s like I just broke more. The emptiness is all filled in with total fucking chaos. I can’t even keep my goddamned powers from going haywire.”
I feel as if I can see the broken pieces of him behind his distraught eyes. I didn’t know that moment made such a difference to him.
But I still have to ask, with a quiver of nerves that rises up despite everything he’s said, “So you’re not at all angry withmeanymore? I didn’t—I didn’t know what would happen that night, but I got distracted; I distracted Griffin. If I hadn’t kissed him…”
