Page 40 of Cursed to Be Mine
My eyes drop to the Sig still aimed in my hand.
My vision narrows on it, seeing nothing else.
The cold metal.
My finger on the trigger.
Oh my God.
Scarlett’s screams finally reach the haze encircling me.
Oh myGod.
Dropping my arms, I then drop to my knees, a broken cry exiting my body in a sudden explosion. “Gen!” I sob as I crawl towards her, the harshness of the gun pushing into my palm with every movement forward.“You tried...tokillme,” she wheezes, her arms wrapped around herself, her whole body trembling.
“You’re bit…” My words trail off as I suddenly recall why I pulled the trigger in the first place.
The gun being empty doesn’t change anything.
She is still dead.
She will still turn.
Then kill me.
But as much as Derek would tell me to find a rock and bash her head in, Ican’t.
“I’m not,” she says, strained words that have confusing meaning.
And then they make sense, hitting me so hard it hurtles my stomach up into my throat. “What?”
The raspiness of my voice shakes the air between us.
My fingers dig into the soft earth, my nails biting into the ground.
“I wasn’t bitten.”
“But the blood…his mouth…” My eyes lift to her head as she sits up and moves away from me.In fear.
I lurch forward, shivers spasming my body, making my limbs uncontrollable.
“I hit it when I was thrown from the car,” she says, her voice soft in its brokenness. “He didn’t bite me.”
“No...no...that can’t be…” I shake my head, unwilling to believe it. That I nearly killed my daughter for nothing. Would have if not for the gun being empty. “No...no,” I say, stuck on repeat as my brain struggles to wrap itself around the current change of events, the adrenaline rush making it fuzzy. “No…”
“Yes,” she spits out, pushing herself up into a sitting position. The mud clings to her skin, morphs into blood in my mind. I was going to blow her brains out. I pulled the trigger.
Iwantedto pull the trigger.
Not just to save her soul, but to maybe appease the reaper after mine.
My throat constricting, I look away. “I’m sorry,” I rasp.
“Fuck you,” Scarlett says just as brokenly, making me flinch.
There’s so much I want to say, I’m sure of it, if I could just find the words, but my mouth is too dry and my throat is too parched to speak. So instead, I push myself to my feet, knowing we can’t stay here, knowing nothing I say will make up for the fact that I tried to kill my own daughter. That I wanted to offer her life for mine.
“Come on,” I say, my eyes darting around the woods. “We need to get back to the safety of the city.”
