Page 92 of Beneath the Mountain Sky

There’s more.

The worst part.

“What did you say, Killian?”

The whole mountain knows to give Killian a wide berth.

They understand he can be short-tempered.

Quick to react.

Even mean, when he wants to be.

But no one has ever seen him panicked.

Panicked, Killian McBride would be downright volatile.

Maybe even to me.

His eyes shimmer in the firelight, unshed tears threatening to spill over. “Fuck.” He shoves up from the chair and paces closer to the fire, staring down into it and giving me his back. A second passes. Then another. Then he chucks his beer bottle into the blaze, the glass shattering as the flames flash up. “I said the thing that made you leave.”

My blood chills as I wait for him to continue.

He glances over his shoulder, and the regret and apology in his gaze are already enough for me to suspect where he’s going with this.

It’s the most obvious path to take when he wanted to hurt me in order to take the pressure off what he was feeling.

My biggest weakness.

He went for the jugular.

Killian doesn’t look away, watching me as he prepares to shatter me all over again. “I asked you why you’d want to have kids after you’d had such a shitty mother. I asked you why you thought you’d be a good one when you never had one yourself.”

A gasp slips from my lips, and the pain that hits me is ten thousand times worse than anything that was ever physically done to me before I woke up in that river.

He finally turns to face me fully. “I don’t know why I said it. Because I’m a fucking prick. Because I felt cornered, and that’s the one thing I’ve never been on this mountain before. Because you were always the only one who could ever get through to me, and that scared the fuck out of me. Because I took my own fear and threw it back at you so I didn’t have to feel so much. I don’t know?—”

“Fuck you, Killian McBride.”

The tears burn hot, sliding down my cheeks.

His hands fist at his sides. “I deserve that. And I knew it as soon as I said the words. I knew it was unforgivable.” He sighs. “So, I stormed out of the cabin and disappeared into the woods with my axe, to take all that agony and frustration out on something other than you.” He shoves a hand through his hair, pushing the long blond strands from his face. “And when I came back to explain, to beg you for another chance, you were gone. Without so much as a fucking note. Just my mother’s ring on the nightstand and all your things gone.” His body trembles. “I drove into town, figuring you were at Raven’s, but she said you’d left.”

I gape at him.

My brain can’t process the fact that the man who was always there for me, was always my everything, could have been the one who hurt me the most by hitting me in my weakest point.

The relationship I had with Mom was difficult at best, horrible at worst, and she was never someone who should have had custody of a child in her state.

He was right when he said I didn’t have a good mother, and he’s right in knowing that saying I couldn’t be a good mother because I didn’t have one would cut me to the core.

To anyone else, it might not have stung as badly.

But for me…

“I knew you would probably never forgive me for what I said, but I tried to go after you. I got on the highway, and I drove and drove and drove, but I didn’t know where you had gone because Raven wouldn’t tell me…”

God bless that best friend of mine.