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She puts her hand on my chest as if touching my heart, then looks bravely up at me. “That’s why you have to let me help.”

“How?”

“I can draw Mason out. I can meet with him. I can?—”

“Meet with him?” I interrupt. “No. No fucking way. Why would you even suggest something like that? Dammit, Keepsake. If I let those psychos anywhere near you, they’ll do God knows what.”

“Mason has a soft spot for me. I’m the only person who can get his defenses down.”

“What’d you mean, a soft spot?”

She turns away, refusing to look me in the eye. Her eyes glisten, like she’s holding back tears. I caution myself to calm down, knowing no good can come from me losing my cool, but I hate the idea of that twisted psycho having any sway over my Evie.

“I’ve never told anyone this. Not even Mom. Not Tash. No one.”

She distances herself, leans against the wall, then slides down it as if her legs have given out. When I try to get closer to her, she snaps, “Don’t.” She stares into space, reminding me of… well, me, those nights I’ve woken from a terror, glanced at myself in the mirror and seen the shell shock in my eyes.

“I’ll tell you,” she goes on, “but please, don’t say anything. Don’t interrupt. You need to understand who he is, so you know why I need to do this. Need to end this. Him. Need to endhim.”

It takes all my effort to remain where I am. I kneel so that we’re eye level, at least, but though she looks in my direction, it’s like she’s staring through me. Into the past.

“He used to…” she shudders.

“It’s okay,” I whisper.

“It’s really not.”

“I’m sorry–I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just listen.”

I nod. After what she did for me last night, helping to soothe the hell in my memory, the least I can do is the same.

“He used to…” She lets out a trembling breath. “This is harder than I thought it’d be, but if I don’t tell you, you won’t get it. You won’t understand how I can twist him. How I can make him vulnerable to you–to us.”

I want to speak, but I stop myself, waiting. She deserves my patience.

“He used to tell me…” She pauses again, then forces herself to go on. “He was going to marry me one day. That he was waiting until I was eighteen, then he was going to make me his wife. He’d say it in secret when Mom wasn’t around. He made it seem like I should be grateful. He said he’d always had a soft spot for me, and he wasn’t going to be ashamed.”

“Did he…” I can’t even say it. She looks so small and afraid, so unlike my Keepsake, so different to how she usually is.

She glances at me sharply, and I realize my mistake.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, miming zipping my lips.

She smiles shakily, then stares at the floor for a long time like she can’t look at me as she goes on. Her pain radiates from her, agony twisting through her perfection. It has no place there. It makes me want to roar, to hurt something or someone.

It makes me want to turn back time and be gentler with her last night. It was her first time, and I snapped–we both did. But now I’m hearing this?—

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

“Huh?”

“You just got a really, uh, sort of scared look on your face.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Dom.”