Page 90 of His Trick

I needed the cold to sting. I needed the air to burn in my lungs. I needed the cold air that felt like needles. Something sharp enough to remind me I was alive, not just drifting in the aftermath of Carrington’s words and the reality of my past.

I love you, Shiloh.

It looped in my head like a fucking curse. No matter how hard I gripped the wheel, no matter how loud I cranked the static-smeared radio, I couldn’t shake those damning words thatfelt so much like a brand. The words that stuck to me like oil, as sure as the fucking rain’s unrelenting raindrops.

My mother’s face swirled in my memories. Her soft smile, easy laugh, and vibrant beauty. She was whole. Then her body flashed. Gone, her absence now a hollow hole that carved through every year of my life from the second I was told she was dead. And now I knew why.

Or at least who. Carrington.

The same man who had pulled me back from my own destruction, who’d touched me in ways no one else dared. The same man whose lips I’d let devour mine in the rain, knowing he fucking killed my mother. The same man I swore I hated as I drove away, knowing I fucking loved him with every part of my fucked up heart.

I slammed my fist against the steering wheel again and again, demanding the images fade. The horn blared into the empty stretch of the highway, and my stupid car kept veering off onto the shoulder. My throat felt scorched and tense, desperate for air.

“Fuck you,” I screamed into the dark car, but the words didn’t stick.

They melted into the storm, into the steady hum of tires on the wet asphalt, as the vehicle practically glided over the puddles. No one else was dumb enough to be on the highway, on a fucking interstate, going a hundred miles an hour.

“Fuck.”

My car hit a patch of icy water and skidded. Throwing my hands up, I waited to fucking die, looked out my window while the trees spun around me like a tilt-a-whirl I couldn’t get off of. I didn’t see any bright light from heaven or hell. I only saw my stupid ass reflection in the mirror.

And then it was quiet.

Just rain, hard, heavy-hitting thunder, and lightning that lit the sky. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t flipped or even crashed. The car had slid around to face the opposite direction on the highway, and I was sitting there, pointed toward the bridge that led nowhere.

Should I just drive off?

The thought made me feel weak…stupid, even. Before some fucking car slammed into me and caused their death thanks to my own stupidity, I got my ass back onto the road the right way and kept driving.

I thought of Xanthy. The perfect woman. Her soft voice, gentle hands, and the way she looked at me like I wasn’t just a product of the violence and scars of my past. She was easy, so fucking mind-numbly simple. She didn’t come with a history tied to blood and loss. She was a little debutant princess, one who expected a prince to nut-up and make her a queen.

She was safe.

I hated that I needed her right now, needed her words and her body. She was like comfortable pajamas you had worn so long you really didn’t want to get rid of them.

The hours on the road bled into one another. Mile markers passed like ghosts. My eyelids burned, but I couldn’t stop, not tonight…not when I needed distance from fucking Carrington.

I wasn’t about to stop at a hotel and remember the way his body tasted in the shower. I wasn’t stopping until I got back to her, to Xanthy. The woman I should be giving my fucking soul to.

I didn’t slow down once. My reckless driving should have gotten me ticketed, jailed, or killed, but then I saw it.

“Welcome to Normal.”

The sign flickered in my headlights, blurred by the rain, and lit up by the lightning cracking overhead.

This fucking place was anything but normal.

By the time I pulled into her parents’ massive driveway, my whole body was shaking. Not from exhaustion, which was also there, but from holding back the weight of everything I couldn’t say to that black-haired, golden-eyed heathen.

The porch light was on.

She must be waiting.

I had ignored the eighteen thousand texts she sent while I was away this weekend. And I didn’t even think to let her know I was heading back. Xanthy always looked ahead. Always planned for my return. I couldn’t tell her I nearly died on the road like an idiot.

Xanthy opened the door faster than I was able to shove a key through the lock, despite the fact that it was two in the morning. Her expression softened the moment she saw me, drenched and fucking ruined.

“Shiloh,” she breathed, reaching for me. “What happened? Baby, I have been texting and calling for days. Why didn’t you answer? Where’s my brother?”