Page 115 of Beyond the Blue Horizon
Our eyes clashed in the mirror.
The darkest night sheering into an icy blaze of blue.
Maybe what scared me most was that the ghosts that glimmered in both of them appeared almost identical.
As if we shared the same threads of sorrow.
Like maybe he could understand me the way a very reckless part of myself wanted to understand him.
Awareness thrummed while the small room shouted with a million questions.
In the dense silence, Theo took my wrist and shifted my arm so he could see the cherry blossom tattoo on my forearm.
His eyes narrowed as he focused on the words woven in between.
In sorrow we must stand.
I saw the way the statement impacted him. The way he flinched as if they were bullets. My spine started to go rigid before he suddenly knelt behind me.
I didn’t think to stop him. It didn’t even occur to me what he would see. What he would recognize as he wound my underwear back over my ankles and slowly dragged them up my legs.
I wasn’t thinking straight at all when his fingertips grazed over the two deep scars on my lower back.
Fury suddenly lit him through as he trembled his touch over them.
No question, Theo recognized exactly what they were before he pushed to standing.
A reaper that covered me in shadow from behind.
His voice lethal.
“Who the fuck hurt you?”
TWENTY-ONE
THEO
In sorrow we must stand.
Rage burned a path through my being as I tried to process the horror that had been left on Piper’s body.
The second I’d brushed my fingers over them, I knew exactly what they were.
Two deep wounds.
Puncture marks that I recognized easily from the mayhem that was my life.
Puncture marks delivered by a knife.
A blade that had been driven deep into her body in what no question had been a savage attack.
I wanted to go on a rampage.
Murder in the fucking first degree.
Piper trembled beneath the growl that I tried to keep locked in my chest, though she straightened the way she always did, putting up a barricade around who she was. Like she thought she had to keep everyone out.
And fuck, I didn’t want her to feel that way with me.
