Total pages in book: 167
Estimated words: 157162 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 157162 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
He didn’t say anything, but there was no blame, no anger in his eyes as the blood slowly stopped flowing, and his eyes became vacant.
My heart twisted in my chest like it had stopped too. But I was hurting. The pain meant I was still alive.
My choice had been made. I’d done it. Marked myself down to the bone. Did it matter that I might’ve saved countless lives, including my own, my family’s, Elliot’s, by killing Jasper?
Yes, it mattered.
But I wouldn’t delude myself into thinking I’d done some kind of good deed. At the end of the day, it was a selfish act to ensure that I got the life I wanted. The life I wanted cost exactly one soul. It wasn’t my job to weigh that soul, to judge its misdeeds. I took it. That was my crime.
I sat with him, stroking his hair from his face, until his blood dried and cooled on my skin.
Then, with great difficulty—emotional, not physical—I pushed his body from my lap, standing in the pool of his blood to look at him one last time. His large body was clad in black, the pool of blood underneath him smeared to look like wings, like he was some dark angel. His eyes were still open, staring at the ceiling, lifeless. Although he was a large body, he’d never seemed so small to me.
“This won’t be the way I see you,” I promised. “I’ll see you as the boy who read Russian literature and romance, who loved Kurt Cobain and bought little girls ice cream. I’ll see you as who you might’ve been. Who we might’ve been.”
With that heartbreaking promise made to a dead man, I turned and left.
I drove home through the night. Not showering. Which wasn’t smart considering I was wearing white, drenched with blood, and all it would take was a routine traffic stop to send everything to ruin.
But everything was ruined already.
Jasper’s body was being taken care of. The murder weapon had already been destroyed along with any trace of me being in that apartment. Even in my state, I wouldn’t leave loose ends. I might’ve killed an important part of myself with that knife, but I wouldn’t completely self-destruct. No way would I enjoy prison.
I made all the necessary arrangements to ensure that I was never tied to Jasper’s death. No security camera footage, no cell phone tower pings, DNA, nothing. Not that it was hard. Jasper didn’t exist in the first place, not on paper anyway. There was no family to report him missing to, no friends, no lover.
Beyond the people he worked for, who wouldn’t mourn him for a second, there was no one to miss him.
Except me.
Once his body was gone, it would be like he had never existed.
It was after midnight when I made it home to Jupiter, ignoring the urge to go to Elliot’s small house in the woods. I ached for the comfort of his arms, as if his scent and his skin would absolve me of my sins. Keep me safe. What I’d just done had guaranteed that I’d never darken his door again.
He’d turn me away anyway, now that I’d told him about Naomi. There was only so far the love of a good man went.
Instead, I drove to the house on the beach that belonged to my brother but was now the only home I had left.
The house I grew up in would always be there. I’d go there for holidays and pretend to be a member of my family, but Thomas Wolfe was right: You can’t go home again. Especially after you murdered the boy you fell for as a teenager who then dragged you into a life of crime as an adult. Crime I committed while wearing couture but crimes, nonetheless.
I’d leave the ghosts of Calliope and Jasper untouched and pristine, running around a small town on a loop, unaware of the life that would ruin them both.
Jupiter was it for me. I had nowhere else to go.
And I’d have to walk around carrying the ghost of who I might’ve been had things been different.
If I wasn’t a killer. If I hadn’t met Jasper when I was a teenager. If I hadn’t met Elliot.
I wasn’t prone to introspection and what ifs, yet I was now being strangled by them. On autopilot, I parked my car and made my way into the house. Or at least that’s what I assumed I did since one moment I was driving and the next I was inside. My memory of how exactly that happened was lost somewhere in it all. Time was being stolen, replaced by the look in Jasper’s eyes, the feel of his blood on my skin, watching the life drain out of him.
I laughed. The echo of the horrid sound ricocheted throughout the house.