Page 111 of Kiss Me Like I Didn't Kill You

Her hand flies to her mouth. “Oh my God. So that’s why you hated me. Why you wanted revenge, because you saw me kiss another man, and because I killed your own brother.”

Tears spill down her cheeks. She shakes her head, voice breaking. “Oh my God… I really killed someone.”

She’s spiralling, collapsing beneath the weight of it.

“After the confrontation with your brother I ran—” she says, then clamps a hand to her temple.

She looks up at me, her eyes wide. “I ran away, terrified, thinking I’d killed my own boyfriend who tried to force himself on me… and then I got hit by a car.”

“What?” I almost roar. The word tears out of me.

She doesn’t meet my eyes. “Clearly I wasn’t badly hurt. Somehow I made it back to the academy,” she says, gasping, pressing her fingertips to her temples.

My jaw tightens. Seeing her hurt rakes me up inside, which is obscene, because I’m the one who made her this way.

“I think my father brought me back,” she murmurs, shaking her head as though to scatter the fragments. “Then I realised the accident must have taken part of my memory. When I met you again, I didn’t know who you were, that we shared a past I’d forgotten.”

A bitter lump rises in my throat. I’ve never been one for tears, but I’m perilously fucking close now.

She looks up at me.

“You’re right to hate me,” she says.

“No,” I answer before I can stop myself. “No, Ophelia, no.”

She cuts me off. “Ikilledyour brother. I deserve this, and more.”

“Rocco was mentally unstable,” I say, in a low voice. “He’d had episodes, hospital stays, treatment, but none of that excuses what he did. You defended yourself. You had every right.”

She shakes her head violently. “No,” she insists. “I’m…”

“I’m so sorry,” I hear myself say.

She blinks, startled. “Why are you sorry?”

“I didn’t sleep with her,” I whisper.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “There’s no going back from this, Arlo.”

“Don’t you dare,” I snap.

She meets my eyes, her voice breaking. “I deserve everything you’ve done to me. I killed someone, I killed your own brother.” She keeps repeating the same words over and over again.

“Ophelia,” I grit, “he wasn’t innocent.”

She stares at me, the words hanging between us.

“You should have told me,” she says softly. “God, if I had known—”

I have no words. Every line I might have rehearsed fails me now. I want to turn back months of fury and folly, to press rewind and choose differently.

If I’d stayed—if I’d trusted instead of letting suspicion rot me, none of this would have happened.

He was not a good brother. Our bond was fractured, selfish and violent.

That doesn’t mean I wanted him dead. And yet, knowing what he tried to do to Ophelia wakes something feral in me, the urge to see him ended all over again.

No means no.