Page 2 of Sapphire Tears

He nods. “I know, and like I said, I have every intention of explaining—”

I reach out and pinch him in the chest as hard as I can. “Ouch!” he yaps, pulling away from me.

“Okay,” I say calmly. “So you’re not a ghost.”

He scrutinizes me with scrunched-up eyes. “You’ve changed.”

“Five months ago, your body was burned to a crisp and you were put in the ground,” I retort. “So apparently, I’m not the only one who’s changed.”

“You have every right to be angry—”

“Gee, thanks for the permission.”

“But a part of me was hoping that a small part of you might feel a little… happy?” he ventures, looking at me like I’m a ticking time bomb that might go off at any moment.

“Which part am I supposed to be ‘happy’ about, Adrian?”

He shrugs. “That I’m here. That I’m alive.”

I breathe out and count backward from ten until I’m composed again. “You always did ask a lot of me,” I say softly. “Too much.”

He reaches out tentatively and pushes back a stray lock of my hair. “Junepenny…” he whispers, voice cracking with pent-up emotion.

Hearing that word in his voice does what the pinch and the breath couldn’t: it makes me finally believe in this. It’s not a dream and it’s not a hallucination.

He’s here.

He’s real.

As for what that means… I have no idea.

I close my eyes as my skin pricks up in goosebumps all over. The blast of the air conditioning from the vents is frigid. Graveyard air. Morgue air. The air of dead things.

“Do you remember why I started calling you that?” he asks suddenly.

I cross my arms and turn my face away from him. Some things hurt too bad to look at. Wounds are always the worst when you don’t know they’re coming. If you can brace for the pain, prepare for it, then you can survive it.

But maybe I wasn’t meant to survive these games.

“I picked you up, and my luck changed,” Adrian continues. “You were my lucky penny. My Junepenny.”

Despite my best efforts, I can feel tears at the edges of my eyes, fogging up my vision and making me feel extraordinarily exposed.

“I know I’ve hurt you. I know I’ve let you down,” he says. “But can you believe that I had a good reason to? Can you try to give me the benefit of the doubt, June? I was only trying to protect you.”

“I’ve heard this song before,” I say, clenching back against the tears. “I don’t want excuses, Adrian. I want explanations. I want honesty.”

“And you deserve both.”

“You really think so…Bogdan?” I peek out of one eye to watch his reaction.

He cringes at the sound of his birth name, but then he sighs and swallows. “That was the name I was born with,” he says, his hand twitching towards mine, though he restrains himself from trying to touch me again. “But the name I wear now is the one I chose, June. And that makes it so much more important. Bogdan Uvarov could never have been with you. But Adrian Cooper could.”

“Adrian Cooper broke my heart,” I answer flatly. “Adrian Cooper lied to me, betrayed me, and abandoned me.”

“I’m a flawed human being, June,” he says, hanging his head. “I’ve made mistakes—so many mistakes. The biggest of which was not being honest with you about my past, my family. At the time, I thought I was protecting you. But now, I see how badly I fucked up in keeping all that a secret. But it stops now. I swear to you, it stops now.”

He’s so damn convincing that I feel my heart quiver. We’ve done this song and dance before. Every time I was on the verge of finally sayingEnough, every time I had a foot out the door—this is the voice he used then. These are the words he chose.

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