Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 89074 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89074 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
But he also said she’d been in boarding school in the U.S. since she was a young kid, and that’s why she speaks English just as fluently as we do.
In the same accent we do.
Strange.
“It’ll be fast, and simple,” she says now, talking in the same accent the Queen had. “Bloody fucking cold here, isn’t it? Cannot wait until we’re back home.”
Something isn’t right.
I don’t know what it is, yet, but my chest is tightening the more I hear her say, and the longer I watch her prod at the bonfire with her phone clutched in one hand.
She clearly thinks she’s alone.
And it is true that no one else is currently at Luros House.
When I pull out my phone to text Hunter, my hands have started shaking. I tap out a quick message, suddenly afraid.
Briar never spent time in the UK, did she?
Nope. She said she’s never been there. I told her I lived in London, and she said she always wanted to visit.
Weird.
What’s up, king? Why do you ask about Briar?
As I start to tap out another message my hands fumble, and the phone slips from my hand.
It clatters down onto the sidewalk and the moment the noise cuts through the yard, I know it’s over.
Briar turns and sees me, and her eyes go wide for a moment, then narrow.
“Get him, and get here, now,” she says in the British accent to the person on the phone. “We have a problem here.”
I move to take off in a sprint, but I trip on a loose stone and lose my footing.
When I hit the ground my palms scrape the ground, a smear of blood streaking across the stone.
Briar has already made it over to me.
And she’s standing above me with a matte black pistol in her hand, pointed right at my head.
“Inside the house. With me.”
26
Hunter
Back then, I thought it was better to be hated than forgotten.
I’d kick and scream and bloody someone’s face before I’d ever let them forget me.
I’d see other kids’ mothers, picking them up from school, and wonder if my own mother even remembered I existed, most days.
The rules were easy.
Don’t rely on anyone.
Don’t expect anything from them. Then, they can’t hurt me.
They’ll never even be given a chance to forget me.
It was that simple.
Then a pretty boy went and fucked it all up.
When I realize Rayne isn’t going to show up, the feeling settles inside me like I was destined to feel this way all along.
I’m down at the end of the street, where Red Row dips into a forested path that leads down to a grass field that looks over the town below, just far enough away from the college campus.
I found the grass field the first night I was here.
When I couldn’t stomach the idea of being in Onyx House yet. I left my father’s house and came here instead. I slept in my car, parked along a little road that backs up to the grass.
But the new feeling settling in my chest isn’t hot, like when I crave violence.
It isn’t cold either, like when the world disappoints me, over and over.
It’s something more like certainty.
Fate, maybe, if that’s something to be believed.
Of course he isn’t going to come.
I have a picnic set up for us down in the field.
Basket, and all.
The kind of thing people with normal lives have, because they’re not worried about being stalked or turning into a violent stalker themselves.
There are strawberries in the little basket, of course.
His favorite.
Also caprese sandwiches, with the freshest mozzarella and the last of the good tomatoes and basil of the season. An avocado cucumber salad.
Little jars full of whiskey, and cans of Coke to mix with them.
I pace back and forth at the end of the street, looking down the forested path where I thought we’d walk together hand in hand.
Like some fucking movie.
Really let myself get carried away.
But now I’ve been waiting for thirty minutes, and I know damn well Rayne was only five minutes away, up the street.
From here, all I see is a curve in the road that leads up onto Red Row.
I can’t see the houses themselves, only the tops of their roofs that show through the patches in the canopy of leaves and branches. Every leaf is gold now, and many have fallen.
The ending of a season.
The start of a new one.
And there’s that ever-present voice in my head, reminding me.
I will always be alone.
I will always be alone.
Part of me doesn’t want to confront the truth. If I walk back up the road to Onyx House, will he be there to look me in the eye and tell me this was all a sick joke?
Like a girl stood up for prom in high school, with the popular jock driving by only to see the expression drop on her face?