Page 209 of Rosetti Family New York
Words come fast, faster than I can think.
“The knife slipped just as he jumped up on me, and it all happened so fast. There was blood everywhere. I tried to stop it.I tried to help him, but Dad found us, and there was so much blood, and I was covered in it, and no one… no one believed me.”
The whole world falls silent. The heat of the room, the pressure of it, close in.
“I held him in my lap until he stopped moving. Bear. His name was Bear. And no one believed me. Not even my own family.”
“Sloane—”
“It didn’t matter how many times I told them,” I say, my voice thin and breaking. “Dad, Mom, Frank, even Lisa, and she was too young to remember it. They never say it out loud, but I hear it all the same.”
“They’re idiots.”
“They’re my family.” I can barely get the words out.
“Still idiots.”
I look at him, confused. “How can you say that? You don’t even know—”
“Yeah, I do,” he interrupts.
“It’s followed me my entire life,” I push ahead. I have to make him understand. I have to know why he isn’t running like the rest of them. “Dad put me in therapy. Mom told me to just let it go. I try, but they kept looking at me like I was some kind of—”
“You’re not.”
I can’t stop. I’m a dam with too many cracks. “Psycho. Killer. Murderer. They sent me away to boarding school, and I kept waiting for the moment when they’d see it wasn’t my fault, when they’d finally understand. But it never came. Even after I left. Even when I thought I’d put it all behind me, it just keeps following.”
“Sloane.”
At the low tone of his voice, I look at him. “Yes?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I blink.
I shake my head, disbelieving.
“You don’t understand. I’m a monster,” I say.
He lets out a dry, short laugh.
“I’ve killed worse things than a dog.”
I stare at him, at this impossible man, not knowing what to make of him, not knowing how to make sense of any of it.
He is steady. Calm. Like none of it matters. Like I’m not the mess I think I am.
“You’re freezing,” he says, his voice low, pulling me in.
“I—”
“C’mon,” he says, wrapping me up again, a dark shelter.
He is so different from everything I’ve imagined him to be. And it hits me, a wave crashing hard.
The only thing I can do is melt into it. Into him.
Before I know it, he’s there, closer than close. His mouth on mine, warm, rough, perfect. It sends a shock through me, and I fall into it, into him, with everything I have. It’s desperate and wanting, everything I didn’t know I’d been waiting for. The feeling of being understood. Of being wanted, without doubt or fear or shame.
