I guide Mason from his theatre room to the bedroom. He’s all octopus—arms and legs dangling, roped around my shoulders. His breathe feathers across my neck. “You’re a good girl, Liv. Such a good girl.”

“Well that’s a new one,” I say, trying to keep my spirits up, even though I want to be the one trying to drown out old memories and feelings right now.

I ease him on to the bed and slide his shirt over his head, carefully tugging it over his neck. His hair sticks out from the static. It might be cute if he didn’t stare at me with eyes glassed with pain. My heart squeezes with unexpected hurt. “Get some sleep, Mason.”

He pulls me down onto him as he falls onto the mattress.

“I should have died that day,” he says, catching me off guard.

I squish up against him and tuck the blanket around us. “Don’t talk like that.” It’s normal for victims of violence to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is maybe why I’ve accepted Mason’s need for sexual dominance. But this feels like something else, something beyond my understanding. “You were spared. For some reason, he didn’t kill you.”

No one would ever know why the man had committed suicide before finishing off his murderous spree. He had enough bullets, but instead of shooting Mason, Lucas, and Holden, he’d turned the gun on himself. My stomach roils.

“We were supposed to die,” Mason says again.

I wipe a stray curl of hair off his forehead and kiss his cheek. “Go to sleep, Mason.”

“You don’t understand,” he says, rolling onto his back.

The pit in my stomach enlarges. I put my hand on his chest. “Mason…”

“Stop it.” He jerks away from me and curls into himself. He looks so vulnerable that the last of the ice around my heart shatters into tiny pieces. Seeing him so broken, so lost, hurts like a sledgehammer to the chest, and it’s now that I realize, I’ve fallen in love with him. This man, this complicated man, has wormed his way under my skin.

There’s a part of me that thinks he loves me too—even if he hasn’t realized it himself.

I’m willing to wait.

“I shot him in cold blood…” His voice cracks. “Killed him dead. Bang.”

My pulse thunders in my ears. “No, he shot himself, Mason.” I wipe his tears with my thumb, and press my cheek up against his. “You’re upset, and not remembering things right. In the morning, it will all be clear.”

He shakes his head. “We lied.” His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “That’s the story we fed to the newspapers to protect ourselves. But it was all a lie. We just told them what they wanted to hear.”

My mind feels muddled. “I don’t understand…”

The corners of his eyes crinkle. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. Nobody understands.”

My fingers ache to touch him, but it’s like all of the blood has drained from my body. My hands are ice cold. I’ve memorized the details of that shooting, can name every student that lost their life—Daylight Holdings has donated generously and publicly to their estates. My throat swells.

“We planned it all out,” he says. “Holden distracted the shooter, and I tackled him. His shot went wide, just missing Holden.” His voice crumbles under the strain of his confession. “I had the gun pointed at his head.” He rolls over to face me and through the mist of his tears, the sheer agony of his pain guts me. The guilt consumes him. “Then once we got him subdued, Lucas and Holden pinned him down while I just stood there, in a pool of blood, the dead bodies of my classmates—my teacher—sprawled out all around me. It was a god damn battlefield, and I was trembling with so much fucking anger.”

My stomach clenches.

“We were surrounded police,” he says, breaking up. “All I had to do was wait. But then I looked over at her body…”

Oh God. My heart is freefalling, spiraling through grief and sympathy, confusion and pain. His anguish radiates from his skin and it makes me almost nauseous with the intensity of it all.

“That woman was like a mother to me,” he says. “She was my mother, at least in my mind. And when I look back into that man’s hateful eyes, I knew.”

My throat goes dry. He looks away, but I turn his chin back. “What did you know, Mason?”

“That I was going to kill him.” He swallows hard. “I lost it, Liv. Completely lost it. There was no way I could let that man walk away, not after what he’d done.”

“But the police would have locked him up forever and then some.”

It was an open and shut case. The killer would have gone to jail for life, and maybe, with time, he could have provided answers as to what made him snap.

“I shot him, and it was premeditated by the time I did it,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut. He jerks, as if reliving the moment. “And then, we made it look like a suicide. The three of us concocted a story to explain his suicide, and we made a vow to never tell anyone what really happened.”

Mason burrows his head in my chest and I pull him close, allowing his sobs to soak through my shirt. I imagine him as the young man who pulled the trigger, his innocence shattered, childhood completely wiped. What would I have done?

Can anyone really know what they’d do in the same position?

A man had come in and mowed down their friends and people who were like family to them. He’d wanted to kill the three of them too, if he’d been able to.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I say, quietly, with a conviction I don’t quite feel. Maybe I don’t fully understand it, but one thing is clear. That man deserved to die. “He was a monster.”

I hang on to that, allowing it to comfort and rationalize, as I thread my fingers through Mason’s hair. “You did what you had to,” I whisper. A tear trickles down my cheek. I sniff it back and close my eyes. “He had to pay for what he did.”

Mason’s breathing goes shallow and his body goes limp.

I curl under the blankets, staring up at the ceiling, drifting to sleep listening to his ragged snores.