Page 46 of Dead Love

My jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”

“You’re saying it like it’s wrong to want something. But what else is life for? What gives us that drive? You’ve got to want something. Then reach out and own it.”

Maybe that was true. And by compromising with my mother, I would be able to find something that would make us both happy one day. Wouldn’t I?

He always sounded so sure of himself.

“But what if I don’t know what I want anymore?” I asked in a quiet voice.

His gaze was hard. “You know. You just have to listen to yourself.”

My scalp prickled. Those words were the truth, but I didn’t want to face that right now. I changed the subject, avoiding it altogether: “What do you want, then?” He lowered his chin. “What about your art? Why do you paint? What exactly do you want out of life?”

He kept his eyes on the table, then ran his finger across the surface, rubbing away a red sauce stain from one of the previous days.

“Work keeps me busy,” he said. “It’s hard to explain. Makes me sound sadistic.”

Curiosity simmered inside of me, but fear overpowered that urge. With all the tension in my shoulders and Andrew’s suspicions vibrating in my head, I was too nervous to ask what he meant.

“Then what about your art?” I asked instead.

“I come to you.”

My cheeks reddened, and his eyes were hot on me, as if he was absorbing everything about me. “What about before you abducted me?” I asked.

“You’ve been my spark for a long, long time, Kora.”

Was it possible that he was there the whole time, making art that was inspired by me?

My breath caught in my chest. I had always known that there was someone out there, watching out for me. It was why I left the window open. Why I stared out the window at night. It was hard to comprehend exactly what that meant. It was both terrifying and comforting, and I was afraid to confirm it, to know that what I had known all along, was true.

“Well,” I blushed, “Thenyoushould follow your dreams too.”

“This isn’t about ‘dreams,’ Kora.”

“Then what is it about?”

We both waited in silence, but then I got irritated and finally spoke: “If this isn’t about dreams, then what is it about? What do you want for yourself? Who cares if you’re sadistic, or whatever you want to call it.” I twisted my fingers into knots. “What even is it, anyway?”

He didn’t say a word. Instead, he scrutinized me. I shrank before him. I stared into his dark eyes, his thick bottom lip, the stubble that stretched across his neck and jaw. I had always been curious about sex, and luckily, Nyla had filled me in as much as she could whenever my mother left us alone.It’s like explosions in your body,she had said.What would it feel like to have his lips press against mine? Would it feel like explosions, or would it feel like nothing at all?

I wanted to know. But he was the only suspect that the police department had, and if he was the Echo Killer, then what did that say about my attraction to him? What did that say about me? Was this a mind game I was playing with myself, to convince myself to get closer to him?

“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to kiss you,” I said, forcing myself to say it. I blushed deeply, but his mouth stayed stern. I shouldn’t have said anything. But when he tilted his body toward mine and parted his lips, the embarrassment left me. I couldn’t think.

“You must be starving,” he said.

But I wasn’t hungry. Not like that.

CHAPTER16

Vincent

The next late afternoon,the embalming machine hummed to life, pumping the decedent’s body full of chemicals. I closed my fists, grinding my teeth until my head hurt. A twenty-one-year-old shouldn’t have to die when they had hardly lived.

Kora was twenty-one.

I should have been able to pinpoint who the culprit was by now; instead, I was here, embalming another Echo victim. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but I couldn’t help but think of her. All it would have taken was one lapse of judgment and Kora would never have come home.