Page 42

She was all broken up inside.

I couldn’t leave her out here in that filthy little place. I couldn’t let her die. I looked around, watching for him.

He was gone.

He knew better than to linger at the scene of the crime. I had to take a chance to get her back upstairs before it was too late.

If it wasn’t already too late.

“I’m sorry for this,” I muttered as I lifted her.

She was so light. Almost nothing. Her blood painted my skin as I draped her over my shoulder, and she let out a sigh of soul-rending agony that threatened to tear me in two.

Janna.

I had let him do this to her. I held her in place with one arm as I used my other hand and bare feet to climb the brick wall—there were enough cracks and openings in the brick and mortar to give me adequate holds.

I couldn’t risk taking her up the stairs in case one of her neighbors happened to see.

Moments later, I was easing her through the window and lowering her to the floor before climbing in behind her.

In the light, the damage was gruesome.

Almost too much to take in at once. I could barely contain my rage when I saw everything he did to her beautiful body, her face.

The light cotton dress she had worn that day was filthy, shredded by his claws and soaked in drying blood.

He had bruised and gouged her thighs, probably trying to rape her, but her underwear was still intact. Her chest was crushed, nothing but a bruised pulp, and his claws had torn her throat, her face, her arms.

Handfuls of her hair were missing, while the rest was a matted, bloody mess. A piece of her eyeglass frames stuck out of her skull as though he had slammed her face into the wall. Her nose was broken, too.

She coughed, and blood bubbled out of her mouth and onto the floor. She tried to open her eyes.

“Oh, Janna. Darling,” I whispered, taking it all in at once, frantic because I knew she was about to die.

She was going to die, and the world would be without her.

I would be without her.

I couldn’t let that happen. She was my job. She was the only light in my life. She was innocent.

She was everything.

I was losing her, letting her slip through my fingers like sand.

Every shallow breath could be her last and damn it all, if there was a merciful God it would be because she was suffering unthinkably and I had let it happen.

I touched the side of her face, her once-beautiful face. She was the only beauty I had ever known—living, breathing beauty, and she had wanted to share herself with me, and I had pushed her away because I had to, didn’t I?

I couldn’t let her get too close. What difference had it made? She was dying in front of me, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Nothing…?

The idea teased the corner of my furious thoughts.

I didn’t want to let it take control because I knew it was a terrible idea, a dangerous one, one which would be my undoing but what other choice did I have?

To let her die, to watch her light extinguish and leave the world—my world—in blank, empty darkness?