Page 38 of Darkest Before Dawn (His Perfect Darkness #2)

I nara

Rex and I stare at each other. Our faces are inches away. I’ve told him a secret I’ve carried for years, one he seems to know. “How did you know?”

“Because.” He toys with my hair, slow to answer.

I sense this is as hard for him to share as it is for me.

“I know what it’s like to look in the face of evil.

To have it change the course of your life.

To unlock something inside of you, something you have to keep hidden because no one else will understand. ”

I understand him perfectly. Our families’ deaths broke something. Our lives continued but were forever changed.

“You have a gift.”

I shake my head. “A curse.”

“It’s a gift,” he insists.

“No, you don’t understand.” I fight to sit up. He rises with me but doesn’t let me out of the circle of his arms. “It was my fault. I dreamed their deaths.” I’ve opened the well of secrets, and now the poison bubbles out. “He killed them as I lay there. I did nothing!”

“You were a child?—”

“I knew.” I thump his chest with my fists. “I knew, and I did nothing.”

“You did. You survived. It was all you could do.”

I’m back there, in my ten-year-old bedroom, hearing the creak of the floorboards. Watching the blood drip from the knife.

“Inara,” Rex calls me back to him. “It was his fault. He’s the monster who came for your family?—”

“I could’ve stopped it. I was supposed to stop it.

” I bury my face in my hands. “I saw the Green Street Murders before they happened. The same with Emily Rodriguez. I’ve dreamed of all the victims. It’s my fault that they’re dead.

My fault.” Telling this to Rex feels like carving open my chest with a knife.

There’s nothing but air between him and my beating heart.

All he has to do is reach out and crush it in his fist.

But he doesn’t. He closes his fingers around my wrists and draws my hands down.

“No, little bird. It was him. It was not you. It was never you. You have nothing to apologize for. Whatever younger Inara did, it was what she needed to do. Whatever she said, whatever she did or didn’t do, it was right. ”

I answer with a sob.

“Feel your pulse.” He guides my fingers to a spot under my jaw. “Feel that? That means you won.”

I let my hand slip away. “I don’t want to feel this way anymore.”

“Then give it to me. Give it all to me. Let me take it. I’m strong enough, little bird. I’m strong enough to carry it.”

Oh, how I want that. I want to give in to him fully. It’s so tempting. I could lay all my burdens on him and live freely in his dark control.

“You lived through it.” I squint at him.

It’s dark, but I can see his aura, the infinite blackness like a midnight sky.

“You know what it’s like.” I sense the truth he’s hiding, and it tumbles out of me like I’m an oracle channeling a message from the beyond.

“You think it’s your fault your parents died. You think you could’ve stopped it.”

His silence tells me I’m correct.

“You were a little boy,” I tell him.

“You were a little girl,” he reminds me.

I have a flash of memory. The old journals in his room—the ones I found where he wrote about me. “Is this why you wanted to find me?”

He tilts his head up to the ceiling. What little light there is in the room caresses his handsome face.

“You understand.” He blows out a breath.

He doesn’t want to share the way I’m sharing, but his truth is the price for mine.

“It started as a childhood obsession. I was caught in a world of pain and fear. I knew you’d understand my pain as I understood yours.

” He cups my face. All my life, I’ve longed for someone to hold me just like this.

And now he’s here, and my heart is cracking open.

“I’m here for you, Inara. For your pleasure and your pain. I want it all.”

All those years he spent searching for me. It’s come to this moment. I believe everything he says.

But there’s more to tell him.

“I see death before it happens.” This is it, the moment we break from each other forever.

“I saw my family’s death. My mother and father, my two brothers.

But after. . . after. . . I also saw my grandmother’s death.

I went to stay with her, and I saw her in a dream.

One day, I went to school, and when I came home.

. . she was there at the table, clutching her heart. ”

“A heart attack.”

“That’s when I knew I was different. I saw death, and it happened.”

“You have a gift.”

“It’s a curse. I don’t just see death. I am death.” This is why I’ve built myself a fortress of solitude and hidden behind its walls. Why I’ve been careful not to allow anyone to touch me. Why I don’t let anyone in. I can’t allow anyone to see me or know me.

Rex opens his mouth, and I continue again in a rush.

I need to get this out before I break down.

“It happened again with my aunt. I saw the poisoned darkness spreading through her. I tried to tell her.” I shake my head.

“She went to the doctor, and they found it. Cancer, spread everywhere. But it was already over. Again, I was too late.” I swallow around my shame.

I’m that little girl again, trying to explain what her dreams impressed upon her.

Trying and failing until the horror dawned, and it was always too late.

“After my aunt died, her husband didn’t want anything to do with me. ‘You’re not mine,’ he said. ‘Your family is all gone.’ He told me I was cursed.”

Rex sucks in a breath, but I’m not seeing him. I’m seeing my uncle’s pain-stricken face. I smell my aunt, the jasmine she grew on a trellis off the back porch. The chance at love and a home ripped from me for the third time.

“He said I was meant to die that night with my family, but I didn’t, and now I was spreading the curse around.” My throat has closed, making it painful to speak. Tears fill my eyes, but I hold them back. I don’t deserve them. “He was right.”

Rex’s face comes into focus. I’m afraid to look at him in case he recoils from me, but I have to. He’s my lifeline to the present. I sink into his dark eyes.

“And then. . . I ran. I stole a coat that belonged to my aunt, stuffed my pockets with granola bars, and left. I had to. I was cursed. Death followed me. It would visit anyone I loved.”

“It wasn’t you.” Rex squeezes my hand.

“I would have a vision of someone dying, and then it would happen. What was I supposed to think?”

He squeezes my hand again, and it gives me the strength to continue. “I lived in a park. I found food in dumpsters. I was gone for weeks, even as the leaves turned and it got cold.”

“How old were you?”

I have to think. It was years after my parents died, during a dark time unmarred by holidays or birthdays. “Twelve.”

He sighs. “I was searching for you.”

I squint at him, unable to understand. Then it dawns on me—the journals in his childhood bedroom. The ones I didn’t get a chance to ask him about. It feels like I found them ages ago.

“I was trying to find you. The papers originally printed your name wrong. It took me weeks to work that out. Hamish didn’t understand.

He resisted, but I kept going. Finally, he saw how much it meant to me and gave in.

We could contact you. Help you. I just knew.

. . you were like me. You would understand. ”

“I wish you had found me. I was so alone.” I stare into the distance, remembering the dread that would fill me as the sunset crept over the park each night.

I would retreat into the shadows of the trees, but not so far that the wild animals would find me.

I stayed on the boundary between the woods and the lights and noise of humanity, but not so close that someone could see me.

There was a bare sliver of space I could exist in.

He strokes my cheek, and it brings me back. “What happened? What got you off the streets?”

“Lacy Collins happened.” I remember her appearing on the edge of the parking lot where I was dumpster diving for moldy bread.

“After working on my family's case, she kept in touch. She would come and check on me from time to time, especially after my aunt died and my uncle told her I’d run away. He made it clear he wouldn’t be my guardian.

She searched until she found me. Just in time, too.

The night she took me in, the ground froze.

My aunt’s coat wouldn’t have been enough.

” I shiver, and Rex moves, tucking the blanket around me.

“She got me into a group home. I’d run away, and she’d find me again. ”

“I remember. Hamish hired a private detective who got close to finding you, but the trail ended with Lacy Collins, and she blocked him at every turn.”

That sounds so much like Lacy that I have to smile. “She checked me into the group home under a false name. She was protective.”

He strokes my hair. “She helped you. That’s what’s important.”

“She saved my life. She got me a roof over my head, gave me a chance to finish school. I graduated early and went to work for a PI friend of hers. She’s the reason I survived and why I use my abilities to solve crimes.

And then I stopped speaking to her because I didn’t think I could let her in.

I can’t get close to anyone.” I pull away from Rex, scrambling back on the bed.

Rex reaches for me, but I avoid his touch.

“Everyone I’ve ever loved has died. Being close to me is a death sentence, and it is absolute. ”

Rex

She stares at me so solemnly. The tear tracks under her eyes glitter.

This is it. She’s confessing everything now. She’s giving me everything, even though she’s afraid. She’s trying to scare me off, but one thing I heard rises above the rest.

I grip her hair in my fist, squeezing but not pulling. “Are you saying you love me?”

She doesn’t have to say it. The way she’s looking at me. . . I know.

“Little bird?—”

“We can’t be together. It’s impossible.”