Page 29 of Haunted Heart
“Don’t touch her,” he says, voice dropped low, glare menacing. Jonas does let go of me, immediately.
“Dude. You need to take a deep breath and just… relax, okay?”
“Relax?” Dylan stalks forward, getting up in Jonas’s face.
I don’t actually know how he manages it with their height difference.
“She’s not yours.” Dylan grabs Jonas’s head and wrenches, tearing it clean off.
“Holy shit.” I flinch back, but Jonas is… fine?
Between one blink and the next, his head is back where it was, turning to me to whisper, “What the fuck?”
Dylan looks at his empty hands, lips curled in an unheard snarl.
“You can’t kill a soul that’s already in Hell…” Julia says, quietly, and then she moves close to me. “I don’t know if we should bring that one back.”
“I have to fix what I did.”
She looks at me with a concern I’m not used to from her. “Do you?”
Dylan grabs me by the shoulders and glares at me. “Are you fucking him?”
“What? No.”
“Good.” He jerks me against him again, kissing me with a… violence I didn’t expect.
It takes me a moment to process what’s actually happening. I shove at his chest, but he doesn’t let me go. So when he tries to press his tongue into my mouth, I bite it.Hard.
And then he’s the one who shoves me away.
I go sprawling backward, hitting the ground with an ugly thud and a puff of yellow dust.
“What the fuck, Genevieve?” Dylan yells at me as he wipes his mouth—as if his tongue was bleeding.
“I could ask you the same.”
There’s no way to go back to what our friendship was. This version of him will always be there, a memory I can’t—I won’t—erase.
Jonas helps me up, and I glance at Julia, floating close, but watching—waiting.
“I spentmonthsdoing all the stupid things you like, learning things no one cares about,” he rants. “I think my time is up.”
“Dude. What are you talking about?” Jonas holds his hands up and out between us.
“I put in the hours.” Dylan doesn’t look at Jonas as he shoves him away, and pushing me back down when I try to get up and get away. “Do you think I like any of that bullshit?”
He snatches the chain from where it lies in the yellow dirt and yanks Jonas off his feet again, dragging him away.
By the time I’m back on my feet, he’s gotten to the well, and Jonas is too busy struggling to realize what’s about to happen. He fights to get away from Dylan and in doing so jerks back when Dylan tries to haul him up to his feet.
Off balance, reeling, all it takes is one push and Jonas falls backward into the dark opening. His harsh yell echoes up as he disappears.
The chain trails after him, catching on the crumbling stones, and I hear the hard grunt as the belt around his waist wins the fight against gravity.
When I try to get to the well, to help him somehow, Dylan shoves me hard enough I stumble back until I hit the porch steps.
He looks down the well and scowls. “Damn. I thought that would kill you.”
