Page 271 of Beyond the Blue Horizon

Sorrow shook Theo’s head. “No, Piper. I was the one who got her involved in that life. She never would have met Toga if it wasn’t for me.”

Justin.

That monster who had used us both. Manipulated us. Bent us to his will.

“I was the one who should have saved her. Saved her and my kid that I never got to meet.” Grief hitched his words.

“She was pregnant.”

Pregnant when she was trying to save me.

A knot rolled his throat. “Yeah.”

I sniffled, still trying to wrap my head around it. “I’m so sorry, Theo.”

No wonder he’d so often looked at my son as if it caused him physical pain.

“I wish I could have changed it.” Theo squeezed my hand tighter, his sorrow bleeding out. “I didn’t love her enough. I tried. I fuckin’ tried. She deserved so much better than me. I did it all wrong. But I won’t do that with you.”

He tipped my face back toward him. “I believed her when she told me I wasn’t capable of loving. Believed my mother when she accused me of the same. But they were wrong, Piper. I just didn’t know it until I met you.”

Tears kept rushing.

Old fears being obliterated and new hopes surging to life.

“I was so afraid of trying again.” His voice was raw. “So afraid of not stacking up. Of not feeling what I’msupposedto. Terrified I’d drag someone into the darkness that I possess. Ruin someone else because I’m nothing but selfish.”

His hand tightened on the side of my face. “Turns out, I am fuckin’ selfish because I won’t let you go. Because I love you, Piper. Love you in a way that I thought I wasn’t capable of. Wholly and completely. With this heart and this body and this life. So in love with you that my heart feels like it’s going to bust out of my chest whenever I look at you.”

He shifted and took my face in both his hands, tilting it toward him. “You are every horizon. Every destination. You are the air I breathe and the ground beneath my feet. And because of you, this dead heart beats.”

EPILOGUES

Theo

“Wookit,myFeo. I gotdisone anddisone!” Finn giggled from where he squatted in front of the Christmas tree, pointing out his presents. Kid’s eyes alight as he was swept up in the magic of Christmas Eve.

“Oh, whoa. You sure have a bunch of presents, don’t you?”

“I open?” He bobbed that head.

I started to tell him yes because I’d give this kid anything he wanted, but Nelly hollered from the kitchen, “Only one tonight, then the rest in the morning.”

“Oh-kay, myNewwy Bewwy.”

A light chuckle rolled out of me, and I ran my hand down the back of Finn’s white hair.

I lay on my side on the rug next to him. Soaking up his joy. The child possessing his own healing magic that glided through my being.

It was all of them, though. This little family that I never believed I could be given.

They were the ones who soothed the pain.

The physical kind that had nearly taken my life. Two days of barely clinging to it, then two more before I was released, though it would have been my honor to give my life if it meant they were finally free.

That bastard put in the ground where he’d always belonged.

But it was the deeper kind of pain that had been assuaged in the middle of it.