Page 48 of Wild Fury (Fallen Royals 6)

I can’t move. Can’t breathe.

Her lips on mine freeze me from the inside out—and shouldn’t it be the opposite? Shouldn’t she breathe life into me?

We’re immobile, the pair of us. Caught in a sliver in time. I don’t know how long we stay like that before I stumble back.

Betrayal fills my chest, and for a moment all I can see is blood.

“Go home,” I growl.

Terror flits across her expression, but she doesn’t argue. She runs.

Fury takes over as soon as she’s out of sight. I smash my fists into a tree, choosing to focus on that pain rather than the hurt lancing my heart. Sometimes I just want to destroy everything around me.

Eventually, I pull myself together. Blood runs down my knuckles, and sweat covers my body by the time I stop. I’m bone-tired, but I force myself to move. To pick up the jog and bypass Lux’s campus, heading back to my apartment.

I don’t slow until I’m on the sidewalk in front of my building.

Inside, unlock the door, toss the keys on the hook. I turn on the shower and set it to ice-cold, then shed my clothes and step in. The water pounds at my skin, and I break out in chills.

But this is the price to pay.

14

Lux

I kissed Theo. The action, the reaction, plays in my mind over and over. The lack of reciprocation. I’m sure first kisses aren’t meant to go like that. So disastrously.

You promised him. And he promised me.

I turn off all the lights and hide under the covers, hoping Ruby doesn’t look for me. I went with her and then absolutely bailed, and now guilt is warring with my disbelief.

Theo and I have been doomed from the start. From the first time we laid eyes on each other, to the first time we actually met. He rejected me then, too. He didn’t recognize me—but I knew him. He still had little scrapes on his face from the car accident.

I had a broken arm.

I’ve tried to think back to when the happiness in me slipped away, when my brain became fucked up. And the answer is now obvious: it all stems back to the accident.

My grandmother and I were going to the store close to her house. I was six or seven, riding my bike ahead of her on the sidewalk. A motorcycle roared up the road, flying through the intersection. Trying to run the red, or just not paying attention—

I was moving too fast to stop. Half in the crosswalk, I would’ve been flattened. I threw myself off the bike and landed with a sickening crunch on my arm. The motorcycle swerved, a belated attempt to miss me, and another car slammed into it from the side.

There was a lot of blood.

I remember staring at the fallen motorcyclist. He was in a pool of his own blood, the dark liquid spreading out on the asphalt.

My grandmother kept screaming, trying to drag me out of the road. But I was fixated. When I realized he was dead, I choked on my sobs. A life gone, torn from the body faster than my mind could process. I couldn’t stop the outpouring of emotions, the endless sadness in my brain that I desperately wanted to disappear.

I fell backward. My grandmother couldn’t catch me, couldn’t stop my downfall. My head hit the concrete, and for a moment, everything blanked out. No noise, no grief, nothing but the dead man and silence.

It must’ve been at that point that everything fell out of me, and the demons crawled in. Because I wasn’t the same after that.

And the other car… A man and two boys. They looked equally traumatized. Confused by how fast everything had happened.

I thought their faces would be burned into my mind forever—but I forgot about them until I met one of them a year later. Theo Alistair.

And it took him some time to remember me.

But once he did, he couldn’t unsee it.

---