“You’re not stopping me!” I yelled, storming out of Ruby Jane’s while Levi chased after me. His footsteps, quick and harsh, sounded just as angry as his yelling had.
Loving or fighting, we could never seem to escape this place without making a scene.
“Don’t be stupid,” he challenged, grabbing me by the upper arm and turning me to face him. “You can’t just go rogue on this. It’s not safe,” he said, and he lowered his voice, softening it around the edges as if I were some sort of wounded animal he was trying to lure to safety. “It’s not right. And you have no idea what you could be getting yourself into.”
But I wasn’t a fucking wounded animal. I was a woman who would do everything in her power to find justice and to make things right, no matter what cost it might have to me.
“Oh yeah?” I sneered. “I know just as well as you do. I know as well as Bethany and Carly and Victoria and Emily all do.” Each name that fell off my tongue might as well have been a dagger straight to my heart.
The girls. The defenseless, innocent, victimized girls.
“That’s a low blow,” Levi breathed, his voice rougher than normal and frayed at the edges. “I’m doing my best. Doing my best to honor them and to find her and to protect you all at once. God, can’t you see that?”
Pain and want and desperation made my blood burn. I felt restless and manic and as if, no matter what I did, nothing would ever feel settled again.
“All I see is some macho asshole thinking he knows better than me.”
Levi stepped back, dropping my arms from the X he’d formed with them against his chest. Distrust and disbelief swirled between us, and I had to work hard to keep air moving between my mouth and my lungs.
“You think that?” he gritted, all of the sapphire blue in his eyes muddied with dirty brown. I’d smeared his name and his intentions, and the insult surrounded him like a cloak. “That’s really what you think of me?”
My heartbeat kicked and thudded in my chest as I considered what I knew—all of the things about the Cold-Hearted Killer I’d found out. How I had to do this to protect him.
I opened my mouth to say the word, the confirmation all that was left on the to-do list of my plan. But the wind whipped, moving his hair away from the line of his face, and his agony took over.
I was ruining this. Ruining us. And I just knew, if I went through with it, we would never be the same.
The silence was answer enough, though, filling in the word when I couldn’t.
Levi’s face closed down, and my heart shattered.
“Don’t worry about me thinking I know better, Grace. You just proved, when it comes to you, I don’t know anything.”
Straight as an arrow, I sat up in my bed, panting and grasping the sheets at my sides. I felt overwhelmed and confused, and getting my bearings was a near impossibility.
I surveyed the empty room and eased my mind slowly, knowing none of what I’d been dreaming—none of the too-clear words, the too-familiar bleating pulse of my heart—could have been real.
All the yelling, all the heartbreak—it’d been Grace’s, not mine. I’d just become so well entrenched in my character I was dreaming as her.
That didn’t explain the depth of emotion or the ruggedly clear vision of Levi’s face, but I couldn’t open up a door I’d long since closed. I couldn’t let myself question the decision to cut Levi out of my life for the good of us both, and I couldn’t bother myself with the complications of his and Grace’s fictionalized problems. I couldn’t. I had enough to worry about on my own.
A shiver ran up my spine, and I pulled the comforter closer.
Wind bumped a small tree against the bedroom window, and the TV I’d left on hummed softly in the background.
But Levi wasn’t there, and neither was Grace.
It was just me—and dreams of their movie.
A nightly routine the cruelest of powers had decided to set on repeat.
With my hands clutched around the comforter like it had the power to soothe my nerves, I stared across the dark space of the room and tried to fight against the onslaught I knew was coming. For nights upon nights, I’d been plagued with the unrest of someone else’s fight, and if the routine remained consistent, this was just the beginning.
I had hours left to toss and turn and several arguments left to have. Reality would once again blur with fiction, and nightmares would catch me in their snare as soon as I closed my eyes.
The distraught look in Levi’s eyes and the guttural desperation in his voice would find me again.
I wasn’t one to believe in psychics or mediums or anything that suggested there was a way to predict the future or see the reality of the past.
But this dream. It shook me. To my very core.
It left me bereft in a sea of unknowns and wondering…what if there’s more to this?