Page 320 of Alpha Mates

I make a sound, but it’s lost to the endless dark tearing me apart. Aiden’s hands are on me, pulling at me, cupping my face in desperation, but I can’t look away. If I do, he might disappear. And if he does, then what’s the point of all this pain?

I watch Oliver move while my mind conjures his oddly bent legs. I see his arms raise and remember the bones that stuck from their joints, the face so full of life—

“I’m just going out for a run. I’ll be back before you know it.”

The world lurches back into motion, and the moment it does, agony descends with unfeeling cruelty.

It’s shameful how easily I forgot its touch—that I could ever forget how terrible the misery feels when it comes. But I did. And my punishment is that when it comes now, it’s worse than ever.

It’s tangled in confusion and terror, with memories that blur and blend into the nightmare before my eyes.

“It’s not real,” Aiden whispers against my ear—so close the words slide straight into it. “It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.”

He says it over and over again, as if repetition could make it true. But his voice trembles with the lie. He’s shaking—petrified. I can feel his fear in my chest like it’s my own, but I’m not afraid. Fear is far kinder than this.

This is hell.

His fear doesn’t make sense—not at first. The thought barely registers as the world crumbles beneath my feet. Then I remember what my brother’s ghost said when it’d first drawn my attention.

Reon.

I look at Aiden then. Finally see his blazing red eyes, burning with tears and fear. So much fear, and pain, andrage.

The world shrinks again, but this time I barely notice our departure—or our return. Neither does Aiden, because he stays pressed against me, his forehead pressed to mine.

“It’s not real,” he whispers in a near-babble. “It’s not real. It’s not real.”

And it makes sense now.

Those words aren’t for me; they’re for him.

He doesn’t want it to be real. He cannotletit be. Because if he does, he’ll fall apart just like me.

But it is real.

It’s not a dream. Not a nightmare.

It’s real, and there’s nothing we can do to escape it.

I turn, drawing away from him before he’s ready, because if I don’t, I’ll throw up all over him. I collapse to my knees. My body finds something to give, the same way cruelty always finds something left to take.

My stomach empties itself onto the stones while tears stream down my face, and I scream. It’s something, at least. Something to break the silence, to shatter the nothingness, to fill the space, but it hardly does the job.

Misery still descends to batter me until I’m nothing more than the scrawny pup I was when I found him. When heleftme.

Left—because he isn’t dead … He’s never been dead.

Oliver is alive.

Chapter 63

Aiden

What do you do when a figment of your imagination draws breath?

There’s nothing youcando—because it’s not supposed to be real. It’s not supposed toexist.But it does. He exists. I watched him speak, and interact with other ghosts.

It wasn’t real—that’s the only explanation.