Page 44 of Dark Little Game

My heart slammed in my chest as I ran out across the rocky sand, mostly worried about the stinging cuts on the soles of my feet because I didn’t know something much worse was coming.

The wind whipped a grey mist so thick over the water that I couldn’t have seen their bodies even if they had been still above water. When Lune’s body finally bobbed over to shore, it wasn’t moving. The part of my soul that was taken in that moment didn’t ever come back. Her body washed up on the beach at my knees, mangled and bloodied by the rocks she’d been tossed against, and something inside me died, too.

She was already dead.

That boy, though.

When he came to shore, there was a shred of life still there in his eyes.

And my fear instantly became something else.

I watched the light leave him. I watched him take his last breath, there on the shore, losing blood as the tide carried it out, wave by wave.

There was a moment when he tried to beg.

And I didn’t help.

He wouldn’t have lived anyway. Wouldn’t have even made it back to the rickety beach house we’d been trespassing on earlier in the night. The Schnapps was stolen from some unsuspecting family’s house while they were out on vacation, after all.

We never should have been there. People knew that Lune and I had been best friends for our whole childhood, and that the only person on Earth who cared about me was taken away.

Poor Hunter.

Get him into counseling.

Treat him differently from now on.

They didn’t understand that the thing that broke inside me could never be put back.

The first time I saw death was whatmade me realize that I’m the type of person who is able to look death in the eyes, unblinking.

And to this day, I can still hear the waves, as they crashed onto the rocks and their sound became almost soothing.

Rhythmic.

Like the beating of a heart.

It was a long time ago now.

Some wounds healed.

Lune was always still with me, even now, but one thing had disappeared.

Fear.

Fear was gone. And what do you do with a lust for revenge when your only truechanceat revenge was already dead?

You find it wherever you can get it.

9

Rayne

Weston and Noah are laughing across the room, but my thoughts are somewhere far away.

“Royal. You studying that history textbook or the birds outside that window?” Weston says, tapping his knuckles on a side table to get my attention.

I shut the thick European History book on my lap, running my fingers through my hair.