Fingers snapped in front of his face. Gray reared back from the hand, instinct telling him to get away before it hits him. His hip slammed into something metal and he grunted as pain flared at the point of impact. “Fuck.”

He blinked the police station into gloomy focus. Ian was no longer the boy in his mind, but the large, forbidding authority figure of his present. But he looked at Gray with the same naked emotions that Gray remembered from their youth.

“Where did you go?” Ian asked. “You just…blanked out. Didn’t even blink.”

“The sanctuary. I remembered us going there when we were teenagers. The day our eyes turned blue the first time.”

“We did?” Ian’s gaze went distant, then he frowned. “I kind of remember that. The day before our fifteenth birthday. We broke into the sanctuary.”

“Yes. We found something.” Gray didn’t know what, only that something happened that day. Something that changed the course of their town’s history, except they hadn’t known it at the time. The memories were hazy, still protected by time and terror.

“What do you mean, we found something?”

“I’m not sure.”

Ian came closer, his larger body caging Gray in. His pulse raced, but not with fear. Ian cupped his cheeks in warm, work-roughened hands, and something inside of Gray melted. He longed for the familiar safety of Ian’s arms. The sweet taste of his lips.

We’ve kissed before.

Gray gasped, his lips parting. Only a hair’s breadth of distance remained between their bodies.

“I never forgot you,” Ian whispered, warm breath fanning Gray’s lips. “Everything faded, but I was able to hold onto a picture of you in my head. Your dark hair and big, round eyes. The way your bangs always hung in your eyes. I didn’t know your name or how we were friends, but you were with me, Grayson.”

Something inside of Gray cracked with that confession, and he ached with the sorrow that he couldn’t say the same. Perhaps because their lives had been so completely different from the moment their parents fled Chosenone. Ian had been taken to a new state by loving parents, nurtured, and provided for; Ian had gone on to have a good career and a promising future.

For Gray, every single moment post-evacuation had been filled with terror. And his life, for many years after that, no better than a waking nightmare. He’d wanted to forget. To be someone else. “I wish you’d been with me,” Gray said. “You always protected me.”

Anger flared in Ian’s eyes. “Who hurt you?”

“Who didn’t?” He hated the whiny, self-indulgent sound of that, so he tried to pull away. Only Ian was bigger and stronger, and he kept Gray still. “My parents dumped me. The cops didn’t help me. Foster care was hell because I didn’t know who I was or where I came from. Then I aged out, and I spent a few years in a halfway house as another guy’s bitch so he didn’t beat me up and steal my shit. I was finally, finally on my own, living my life, and fucking safe. And then this shit gets stirred back up again!”

Ian took a measured step back, his hands falling away to curl into fists by his sides. He looked ready to do battle on Gray’s behalf; Gray had missed the unerring loyalty.

But Gray was also scared and angry, and a tiny part of him hated Ian for the great life he’d had, while Gray had barely survived past twenty-four years old, much less gotten all the way to thirty. And he’d done it without Ian. “You and your doting parents and fucking Florida. Why did you get such a great life? How come you weren’t the one taking it up the ass whenever a prick who’s bigger and stronger than you felt like it, because putting my face in a pillow until he was done was better than bruised ribs and a broken nose?”

“You never reported him?” Ian asked.

Gray’s laughter was long and bitter. “Like anyone would have given a shit. You are the only person in my entire life who ever gave an actual damn about me, and you weren’t there.”

“I know.” Ian seemed caught somewhere between anger and sorrow.

“I lived in a seedy motel and rode a cheap bicycle to my job as a gas station clerk, while you were out there being a boy in blue, saving lives and making a difference.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you.” Gray stared, and even Ian seemed shocked at what he’d said. Then Ian’s shock shifted into determination. “I love you, Grayson. I did then, and I still do now. I don’t think I ever really stopped.”

Gray wanted to believe that more than almost anything, but he was too used to protecting himself to accept it so easily—not even when his own heart was screaming that Ian was telling the truth.

“The moment I saw you in that theater,” Ian continued, “something heavy lifted off my chest. Something that has been there for the last fifteen years, keeping me from giving my heart to anyone else, because it’s already taken. I gave it to you a long time ago.”

“Half a lifetime ago.” An odd thought occurred to Gray. “You haven’t been in love since then?”

“No. I was lucky to ever get past the first date with anyone, and sex…no one appealed to me. Men, women, no one.”

Gray took another careful step backward, happy and sick and so confused he didn’t know what to say. The part of him who remembered bits of their shared childhood rejoiced at knowing Ian loved him, had waited for him all these years. Another part of him was ashamed. Ashamed at everything he’d allowed to happen to him, and how pathetic he must seem to Ian. How used and dirty.

“Have you been in love?” Ian asked. So careful, as if the weight of his entire world rested on Gray’s answer.

Gray didn’t even have to consider his words. “Not since you. After Slater, I just couldn’t stomach the idea of being with another guy.”

“Slater.” Ian repeated the world as though it disgusted him. “Is he the one who abused you in the halfway house?”

“Yeah.”

“You do realize that after we’re done here, I’m going to hunt that prick down and shove my baton so far up his ass he’ll be able to lick the tip.”

“You really think we’re going to walk back out of this town?”

Ian tilted his head. “Don’t you?”

“No.” He’d been honest about everything so far. No sense in stopping now, not even to make Ian feel better. “We were supposed to die in that sanctuary fifteen years ago, Ian. Something tells me that is still on the table.”

“Fuck that. We saved each other the first time. We’ll do it again, no matter what we find in that damned place.”

“You really believe that?”

Ian’s face hardened. “Yes.”

He did, too. Gray saw all the resolve and determination in Ian that he didn’t feel himself. Gray didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to give in to whatever fate had in store for them today, but he was tired. Tired of being alone, afraid, and uncertain. Tired of his meaningless existence. His entire life had come down to this.

“Then I guess you’ll have to believe it for both of us,” Gray said.

“You’ll believe it too.”

“We’ll see.”

“The fuck I’m leaving that to chance.”

Before Gray could ask what he meant, Ian hauled him into his arms and covered his lips with his own. The hold should have scared him, but the kiss exhilarated him. Gray’s pulse raced and his heart kicked. Intense need and desire flooded his chest and burned lower. He parted his lips, and Ian’s tongue swept inside to taste him. To lick and press and explore, and oh my God, Gray didn’t want it to stop.

Everything in that moment was pure joy. Nothing existed except their bodies, moving until Gray’s back hit a solid surface. Ian pressed into him, his thigh a firm pressure against Gray’s thickening cock, encouraging him to indulge in this sweet forbidden fruit. Gray chased Ian’s tongue, tasting him now, so sweet and heady and familiar. Fingers tangled in his hair. Gray clutched at the back of Ian’s neck, keeping him there, slanting his head for better access. They kissed and rutted and breathed each other in, until all of Gray’s nerves were on fire.

He wanted to drop to his knees and take Ian into his mouth. He wanted Ian to do the same for him. He wanted to lay down and let Ian have him, slide inside of his body, and bring them both so much pleasure.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I want you to. Please.”

Gray cried out as the fraction of a memory upended his entire world. Ian released him, lips puffy and wet, breathing hard. “What’s wrong?” Ian asked. “Too much?”

“No.” He touched the light coating of blond stubble on Ian’s cheek. “Another memory.”

“Tell me.”

He searched Ian’s face, somehow equally lusty and concerned. No, this was something Ian needed to remember for himself, and he might not do it standing in a dusty police station. They needed to return to the sanctuary. “Not yet. Come with me.”

Gray took Ian’s hand and led him out of the station, out of the municipal building, to the slightly less stuffy air on Main Street. As much as he’d rather drag Ian into another building and find a semi-clean flat surface so they could finish what they’d started with that kiss, finding answers took priority over their physical needs. Ian was the last person Gray had been with out of choice; he wouldn’t be with him again out of desperation and loneliness.

They both deserved more than that.

He carefully navigated the broken street, avoiding the worst of the cracks and fractured chunks of asphalt. Ian stayed close, holding his hand, allowing himself to be silently led. Gray’s palms ached where he’d scraped them, but he wouldn’t let go of Ian. Ian was his courage, his lifeline.

The rock-lined road to the sanctuary came into view, exactly as Gray remembered it. They walked the dirt path, the wood fence looming in the distance, and beyond it, the peak of the building. Beneath those wood shingles was the pulley and inverted cross. He now understood that the cross had been an insult, a Satanic symbol.

But what was it doing in Chosenone?

Sacrifice.

His rational mind screamed against such a thing. Human beings didn’t sacrifice other human beings in bizarre rituals. Except they sacrificed each other every single day. They sacrificed their fellow man to bigotry, hate, and fear. By clinging to old ideologies. By believing in the interpretations of ancient texts by fallible men with agendas. Children were sacrificed to guns. Safety was sacrificed to propaganda.

An entire town gathering to sacrifice two teenage boys to…something, was as rational as the rest of the world and its insanity.

The heavy chain that had kept the gate locked his entire childhood hung by one door, the padlock on the ground covered in dust. They pushed together. A chill wormed down his spine, a kind of déjà vu. He’d walked through these gates once before, except he hadn’t been with Ian. He hadn’t been with his parents, either, and he vaguely recalled feeling dizzy the entire way. Unfocused.

Drunk.

“Blessed is the blood of Chosenone-ami for in her name we give this sacrifice.”

Dark and red, like wine left to rot into something far more sinister. More metallic and ugly. It hit the back of his throat now, as if he’d just swallowed it again, and Gray gagged.

Ian released his hand to squeeze the back of his neck. “Grayson?”

“I keep getting these tiny flashes. They’re disjointed, but intense.” He wanted to mention the wine, but couldn’t ignore a flash of anxiety that insisted he let Ian remember these things on his own. He had to be recalling things like Gray was. All the things they’d both forgotten because of time and distance and whatever magical or spiritual force pervaded their tiny hometown. “Aren’t you getting them?”

“I’m not sure,” Ian replied. “When I think I remember something about this place, it’s kind of hazy, like the shadow of a memory. Indistinct.” He frowned. “Why would we be remembering differently?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore, except that I feel like I’m losing my mind. Something horrific happened here, maybe more than once. Maybe over and over again. I don’t want to know what it was, but I have to, and that terrifies me.”

“Hey, I’m scared too. But we can’t walk away from it.” Ian clutched his hand again. “We’ll face it together, just like when we were teenagers.”

Together. They could always do anything, as long as they were together.

“I don’t want to die,” Gray said. “But I also can’t keep living in fear. I won’t.”

“Then let’s do this.”

“Yeah.”

They set forward again, hand in hand, up the dirt path to the sanctuary doors. Stones had been kicked out of place here and there, probably during the hasty evacuation of the building. Parts of its wood roof was gone, bits of charred wood sticking up here and there close to the top of the stone walls, and the odor of burned things was stronger. The air hotter, almost stifling. But Gray was chilled to the bone.

Ian nudged one of the doors, inexplicably shut, considering folks had once fled the premises in a mad panic. Over a blazing fire.

“It started here,” Gray said, sure of the knowledge before he spoke it. “The fire that caught the coal veins on fire all those years ago.” He shoved the other door hard, as desperate for answers as he was scared of getting them. Hot, acrid air rushed out.

Gray stepped inside.

More light than he remembered, thanks to the missing roof. It showed off the earth arena, scorched black and somehow devoid of debris or even leaves scattered by the wind. As if anything organic had been seared away by the intense heat rising from the middle of the pit. The wood plank floor was gone, a black hole in its place—the source of the heat. The metal cross and pulley system lay on a riser a few yards away, useless.

The sight of it made his stomach clench tight. He felt the cold iron against his skin, the rough ropes binding his wrists and ankles. The heady sensation of being upside down. Hanging in the air. A warm body nearby, wriggling. The urgent need to vomit.

“Oh shit.” Ian dropped to one knee, releasing Gray to hold his head with both hands. “Fuck me.”

Gray knelt beside him. “What did you remember?”

“Not that. I can’t—fuck.”

Ian bolted back outside. Gray followed, his own fear fading under genuine concern for his friend. Ian was dry heaving a few feet from the building, hands on his knees, his whole body trembling.

“Ian?”

“Give me a second.” He coughed and sputtered, then took several deep breaths before straightening. Still angled away, he said, “I haven’t had a panic attack in years.”

“Panic attack.”

Ian kicked at a stone. “Yeah. I’m terrified of fire. I’ve never been camping or to a bonfire. Even matches and lighters make my chest tighten. One time my unit was involved in a house fire, and I freaked the fuck out so badly they had to sedate me.” He grunted. “Made me real popular in the department after that.”

“The reaction makes sense,” Gray said. “I’ve never been super fond of fire myself.”

“Just now I think it was the combination of the intense heat and the smell of charred wood. It overwhelmed me.”

“You don’t have to go back in. I can hunt around myself.”

“For what?” Ian finally turned and looked him in the eyes. “What do you think you’ll find? That place is a tomb.”

“I don’t know.” Gray didn’t want to go back in alone, but he would. They only had a few more hours of daylight left, and he planned to use every possible moment to patch together their past. “But I need to look. Maybe these flashes I keep having will come together and make a coherent picture.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.” Gray smiled. “Right now, the only thing I’m sure about is you.”

“Same.” Ian studied him a moment, then straightened his shoulders. Took a flashlight off his utility belt. “Let’s go. Together.”

“If you need to leave, I’ll understand.”

Ian nodded, and they went back inside. Gray tried to think back to the day he and Ian had busted into this place. They’d both been terrified and confused, exactly as they both were today. Intent on solving the mystery of their eyes and blue marks. That tattoo had faded over the years until it was a barely discernable shadow on his chest, just like before, and yesterday it hadn’t jumped back to its bright blue glory like his eyes.

Except…Gray tugged down the collar of his t-shirt, then cried out in dismay.

The blue tattoo was back in full force. “Fuck,” Gray said.

Ian looked down and his eyes bugged out. “Christ, mine didn’t…fuck.” He gave Gray the flashlight, then loosened the tie and collar of his uniform. Yanked at the undershirt so he could see. “Mine’s back. Shit.”

“Mine wasn’t like that yesterday.”

“Neither was mine.”

Gray blanched. “Do you think they were, like, activated by us being here?”

“At this point, any damned thing is possible, so yeah.” Ian’s expression went distance. “It’s funny, I kind of remember the morning I saw my eyes were blue. I freaked out, and I showed my parents, and they…they were both happy and sad. It was as if they knew something good was going to happen, but it also made them sad to see it.”

“Burning their kid on an upside down cross is a great way to put a damper on your day,” Gray said dryly. “Unless your parents don’t like you.”

Ian looked down at Gray, thoughtful now. “Maybe your parents were distant because they knew they were going to lose you. Maybe they didn’t show love, because losing you was going to be break their hearts.”

Gray sneered. “Then why dump me at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere? They had to fucking know what would happen to a fifteen-year-old kid living on the streets. I was fucking fifteen the first time I was raped, Ian! And it’s all their fucking fault for leaving me behind!” His voice echoed in the empty chamber, sending back all of Gray’s anger and pain. He sobbed once, but refused cry again. Not in front of Ian.

Ian tugged him into a tight, warm hug that was almost stifling in its intensity. Part of Gray wanted to fight, didn’t want Ian’s pity over his shitty past. The rest of Gray just wanted Ian, period. Only Ian started shaking, and it took Gray a moment to realize that Ian was crying.

“Hey.” Gray tried to shush him. “What’s wrong? What did you remember?”

“Not me.” Ian straightened up, but didn’t loosen his hold on Gray. His face was red, cheeks damp with tears. “I was safe and warm in some motel in Virginia while you were…fuck, Grayson. I’m so fucking sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I should have made my parents take you with us. I promised I’d always be there for you, and the moment I wasn’t, you were…”

“Raped? You can say the word Ian, I’ve made my peace with it. I know what I am. I’ve always known.”

Ian made a sharp, pained sound and took three full steps backward, staring at Gray in horror. “I did it, didn’t I? Somehow, it’s because of what I did.”

Gray frowned. “You mean by kissing me that day we broke into the sanctuary? That kiss didn’t put some invisible sign over my head that said ‘Perfect Victim for Rapists,’ Ian. None of that was your fault. I was an easy target because I was a kid, and I was never taught how to stand up for myself. My parents didn’t prepare me for the real world, because we lived in some kind of fucking bubble, fantasy world here. One they obviously didn’t expect me to grow up in.”

Ian still looked horrified. “No, not the kiss. No, this was…later.”

“I still don’t remember later.” Gray couldn’t imagine a single scenario in which the Ian from his past would have done anything to hurt Gray. Definitely not something that would put that look on Ian’s face. “I remember both of us coming here to look around. Seeing the upside-down cross for the first time. Being scared and hugging. And then we…”

We didn’t kiss for the first time here. It was later.

“Then we…” Gray grasped for the memory, but it danced out his reach, taunting him from a distance.

We found the book.

Gray’s entire body shuddered as he fell into the memory of half a lifetime ago….