Page 149 of Kill for a Kiss

“It was four years ago,” she says, stroking her thumb along my jaw. “I was hiding in a closet with my brother. We watched from there and saw what you had to do. What you were told to do.”

I tense, but she keeps tracing over my heart, keeps anchoring meto every word from her lips.

“My parents weren’t good people,” she says. “That’s a terrible truth we can’t ever change.”

She stretches her legs, bare and marked. The sight of her burned skin twists my stomach into knots.

The rage builds fast, but the guilt presses harder.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “You were just kids.”

Her eyes stay kind, in a way I don’t know how to accept. “Sterling…” she whispers. “So were you.”

My heart stops at her words. She leans up and kisses my jaw. Her fingers card through my hair. Her breasts press against my chest. The feel of her pulse on mine restarts my heartbeat.

“I wasn’t afraid of you, Sterling. I was sad for you because you looked so alone.”

Her smile’s still faint, but it breaks me open.

“I remember seeing you with blood on your hands,” she says. “You didn’t leave right after what you had to do. You were on your knees, staring at your hands, almost as if you weren’t sure how the red got on them or how to get rid of it.”

Her voice shakes. I squeeze her other hand.

“I’m remembering more of my childhood lately,” she says. “Mostly how lonely and scared I was for years… How I kept pretending I was strong, when most days I felt like I was breaking in half just trying to get through the day.”

I can’t breathe. I can’t look away.

“But since you stayed by my side, I haven’t felt afraid or alone. All you do is make me feel safe, Sterling. Like I’m not a book with missing pages, but one that has more pages to be filled. To finally write my own story.”

Her eyes meet mine, steady through the tears.

“Even though we met through fire and darkness, it led me to you.To loving you, Sterling.”

My chest caves. The guilt hits harder than anything Clo ever carved into me. Because I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserveher.

I was there when her story started falling apart. When the fire took her family and Kys warped her mind. When she was just a girl and I was a boy made into a weapon pretending not to see where her story would lead to.

I failed her long before I ever held her. Long before I knew what it meant to love her. And now she’s looking at me like I’m the reason she believes she still has pages left in her story. When I’m not the reason she can rewrite herself—she is. She’s powerful all on her own. She can make monsters behave. She can breathe life into bones that have only known pain and suffering.

My hands shake. I press them on her anyway. I need to feel that she’s still here, alive and safe. I want to tell her she’s wrong. That I’m still the monster she keeps letting in. That I’ll never forgive myself for not saving her sooner.

But then she says, “Thank you, Sterling.”

The monster inside me falls silent at her words. Her voice has been the only thing that’s ever reached the part of me I thought was too dead to be revived.

She opens her mouth, looking like she’s trying hard to push the words out into the open.

I kiss her hair, showing her I’m listening. That there’s nothing she could ever say or do that would change the way I feel about her.

“I’m not proud of this, but ever since I was little, I’d pray for my parents to disappear,” she confesses. “Every night, I prayed for that. I knew what they were doing was wrong. I tried to stop them. But they found ways to stop me first.”

Her breath catches. She hides her face in the crook of my neck.

“They nearly let me die each time I fought back,” she says. “But Iwouldn’t give up.”

My brows furrow while I rock her gently.

“I wanted revenge,” she whispers. “I wanted them to pay for all the suffering they’ve caused. But I knew if I did it myself, I’d never be able to live with it.”