Page 109 of Kiss Me Like I Didn't Kill You
The door bursts open, the sound makes me flinch.
I look up.
Midnight blue bleeds into green.
“Ophelia,” he breathes.
I stare at him, the air leaving my lungs.
“Arlo,” I whisper. My voice cracks on his name. “But I… I… I killed you.”
Chapter 37
Arlo
I stand perfectly still, unable to look away. Her expression is a catalogue of ruin, disbelief, fury, betrayal, and then that raw, unguarded hurt that lands like a physical blow.
Guilt claws at my ribs, but I stamp it down. There is no room for it here.
This, this moment, is why I came to St. Monarche´.
I came to make her pay. To break her as she broke me. To plant a doubt so deep she would never again feel safe inside her own mind.
Those notes were the first move, little provocations left exactly where I knew she’d find them. Each one whispered the same thing, someone, somewhere, knows.
That sort of fear comes slowly, it works away at you, grain by patient grain, until certainty corrodes and you’re left unmoored.
She had already shattered the phantom of a heart that, for all its hollowness, once beat only for her.
But that was merely the opening gambit. She needed to taste betrayal, she needed to understand what it felt like to be cheated.
So Zara entered the picture.
My aim then was twofold.
First, to make Ophelia remember me—she had lost entire years, and I needed her to feel what she once felt, to know me again.
Second, once memory and affection returned, to crush them, to show her in the cruellest mirror what betrayal tastes like.
I had expected satisfaction, vindication.
Instead there was nothing, a void where triumph should have been.
The revenge I so carefully built freed nothing, it only left me colder, and emptier than before.
“Oh my God. But… but I… I killed you. That night…” she whispers, horror carved into every line of her face.
Whatever pity I’d felt evaporates. Old fury snaps back into place.
I laugh, humourless. “That night? You mean the night I found out about your betrayal, and then you killed him to keep your secret?”
Confusion floods her eyes. “Who are you talking about?” she asks, bewildered, shaking her head. “I… I don’t understand. Who do you mean?”
“You killed my brother, Ophelia,” I say. “Rocco.”
She blinks. “I have my memories back. I remember…us,” she says in a small, breaking voice. “But I don’t remember you ever mentioning a brother.”
“Because I didn’t,” I answer, in a flat tone. “That is neither here nor there.”
