Page 140

I turn back to Eli. “Why would you ask Kelter to findme?”

He takes a deep breath and lets it go, relief spilling out with his words. “A little boy came to me. Messy golden hair. Freckles. Dirty and a little wild. He knew about me, somehow. He said if I brought you here, you could fix me.”

The little boy came to him over a year ago? How could that—

“But all that’s not even the worst of it,” Kelter says, rolling his head to Eli.

Eli sets his jaw askew in smug defiance.

“Youdoknow.” Kelter puts himself between Eli and me.

“Know what?” I ask, though not sure I want to hear anything else. I move out from behind Kelter. The light blue walls close in. The vines creep toward the corners.

They stare at each other, face-to-face. Kelter stands inches above Eli, but his wasted muscles take away any menacing look he might have been able to achieve.

“Then I’m right, it goes both ways?” Kelter asks.

“Not all of it.”

Kelter shoves him. “You thought you could pretend that I don’t know what you are now, that I don’t feel what you feel?”

“YouknowI don’t think that.”

“I’m not going to sit on my hands while you take her in yours. I’ve seen what you do. I’ve got all these memories in my head.What am I supposed to do with them? What am I supposed to think? I don’t even know who I am anymore. I only know that I can’t forget about every long look into her eyes, the hours you spent watching her sleep, the thought you put into those notes—”

“Shut your fucking mouth.” A bruised fist forms at Eli’s side. “Those aren’t your thoughts to share.”

“But theyaremine now. Kissing her, the knife against her skin as you cut away her clothes, the smell of jasmine while I—you stuck your tongue inside her? I didn’t expect she’d like it so rough.”

“Kelter!” I whirl back to Eli. “Why would you tell him that?”

Kelter only continues. “It’s all in my head, as crisp and real as if it had been me. And you think I can experience all that—after being the one who spent a year building an actual friendship—and ignore it?”

Kelter hooks my waist, pinning me to his side. “I can’t.” Then with a hand behind my head, he smacks a kiss on my lips. As though he’d done it before.

The colors in the room swirl around me. I escape—from the kiss, the press of his lips, the suffocating warmth of his skin. Everything about it is wrong. I don’t want him likethis.

“Let the fuck go of me, Kelt.” I try to slip away, but his arm stays looped around me.

Eli is still. Quiet. Watching my reaction.

I spin my rings in frenzied circles. Rage against these two men festers and blisters in every cell of my body. I can’t make words from the thoughts that bump and clash and bruise my fragile mind. I need Eli to tell me. I can’t ask. I can’t hold on to the pieces long enough to make sense of them, not when they fracture and flip, not when they hurt.

How does he know about those things? Between us.

“Eli…”

Calm and lethal, he untangles me from Kelter, his firm hands pulling me away. But I don’t wanthishands on me either.

He speaks in the most controlled tone. “Those are my memories. Just because you have them doesn’t mean they’re yours. And neither is Never. She belongs to me, and I swear I’ll finish what my knife started if you can’t understand that.”

“How?” I sputter, ignoring the death threat for a moment.

Eli’s gaze embraces me, that insatiable darkness, his ancientness now muddled with the comfort of a friend who will curse at the stars and drink coffee through sunrise, and those turbulent brown of his eyes now flecked with green and gold, tender and carnal. This can’t be real. I want to run. But his scent dominates me, traps me—dank, cold darkness, so strong I can taste him.

“The little shit was dying. All I did was try to stop the blood flow, and somehow that healed him. But something else happened.”

“What happened?” I say slowly, my stomach filling with lead.

Eli tugs on my pockets, walking me into the slice of dangerous space between him and Kelter. “I accidentally, somehow, merged us into one…all the way back to the beginning.”

THE END