Genna places her hands on mine and slowly eases them away from my ears. She interlocks our fingers. “There’s nothing that I can say to you that will make anything better. Nothing. I won’t be a part of what’s left of your mind trying to prolong the inevitable—Look at me.”

I do look at her with tears streaming down my face.

“Because it’s wasteful to use what little time you have left on delusions.” She squeezes my hands hard and it’s almost as if I can read her thoughts now. I sense she’s telling me these things with so much severity and devotion that maybe she’s also saying them to herself. Maybe she needs me to right a wrong that in her own past, she could not.

I sniffle back a few tears. “There’s nothing anyone can do to help me, is there?” I say.

She shakes her head and lets go of my hands. “No,” she says carefully, “so don’t use this time falsely hating Isaac for loving you so much.”

Her words rip through me.

Genna walks away, gazing out the window now with her back to me. She seems lost in painful memories of her own.

“Malachi…he told me to tell you that he still loves you.”

I see the faintest flicker of heartache tremble over Genna’s features, but she’s better at hiding heartache than I am.

“Who is Malachi?” I say softly.

“Someone I loved once,” she says, still gazing out the window, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Why can’t you still love him?” I know she still does. She may be able to refrain from breaking down like me, but it’s not so easy to hide love. But I go along, knowing that she doesn’t want to talk about this as much as I didn’t want to talk about Isaac.

“I just can’t,” she says, unfolding her arms and moving away from the window altogether. “We are the same. To be together would mean that one of us would ultimately kill the other.” She walks toward the restroom and says, “It is the way things are—now get some sleep.”

24

A LOUD POUNDING WAKES me from my sleep. “Housekeeping!” For a long moment, still with a series of blows on the door, I don’t realize where I am. But the louder the knocks, the faster my head comes together. I’m almost used to time being stripped from my mind, so when I rise up from the hotel bed and realize that it’s a new day and that Genna is gone, I just shake my head at all of it and walk over to open the door.

“Sorry, I’m just getting up,” I say looking through the half-open door out at the housekeeper who scowls back at me. “I don’t need any service, though. Thanks.”

“Honey,” she says in a slightly irritated voice, “it’s past check-out and I need to get this room ready for the next inconsiderate over-sleeper who thinks that this is a luxury hotel.” She blinks her eyes rapidly at me.

Somehow, I don’t feel so bad anymore about how filthy I left the bedspread.

“Fine,” I say. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll be right out.” I shut the door before giving her a chance to respond.

I stand in the center of the room for a moment, thinking about what I’m going to do, but my emotions are too conflicted right now to give in to what my heart is telling me.

I run my hands over my face and the top of my head. As I go to grab my bags, I notice something out of place sitting on the little round table by the window. A vial of blood, just like the ones they use to draw blood in the hospital, lies on its cylindrical side in the center of the table. Next to it lays a note, scribbled in Genna’s handwriting that reads:

I take the vial into my hand and just stare at it before crushing my fingers around it. Grabbing my purse from the chair, I tuck the vial safely into an inside pocket and then shoulder it and my duffle bag before heading out the door.

The housekeeper, with her cart parked outside the room next to mine, sneers at me as I pass by.

“Thanks for giving me a minute,” I say, regardless of her attitude. “Have a nice day.”

“Umm hmm,” she says, “you too.”

I don’t even know where I’m going and when I leave the hotel, I leave on foot. I check my cell phone once, noticing eleven voicemails, twenty-two missed calls and sixteen text messages, but I don’t check any of them. I walk forever it feels like, with no destination until I eventually find myself in the park, staring across the pond and at the giant tree that used to be my thinking spot. I can almost see me and Alex sitting there underneath it the night our lives changed forever, as if I’m a ghost and watching my past unfold over and over again in some kind of lost soul loop.

A blue and red polka dot ball rolling across the grass in front of me pulls me out of my thoughts.

“Sorry, lady,” I hear a tiny voice say and find it feels awkward to be called lady at seventeen.

I smile at the boy who crouches low against the ground to lift the ball into his hands. Absently, I watch him as he waddles back over to where a few other children play on the playground equipment.

And then I see Alex and me on the giant red slide. I’m at the top getting ready to go down and Alex is waiting at the bottom to catch me.

“Come on, Dria!” she shouts, banging her small hands on the hard slide plastic. “Don’t be a chicken!”

I was always nervous going down that slide because it seemed so high. But Alex was always there to catch me, to stop me before I flew off the end and landed on my butt in the hot bed of pebbles.

I look away, wanting to forget.

All this time, since I left the hotel, I’ve been seeing Isaac’s face in my mind. I’ve just been wanting to shut it out, to replace it with other things that apparently aren’t making it any less painful.

Isaac is my life now. Not my mother and her self-abusing lifestyle and not my sister, who I guess in a way has fallen in my mother’s footsteps.

As much as I am angry about what Isaac did, he means everything to me.

He gave everything up to save my life. He gave up his position as Alpha and he gave up his own life for breaking the Law and bonding me to him though he was forbidden to do it. If Trajan ever finds out about this, Trajan will have to kill him….

How could I let my anger blind me so coldly? Isaac made a decision, probably the hardest decision he’s ever had to make, bonding me to him without my permission and sealing my fate. But Isaac was right. Viktor would have done it if Isaac hadn’t. The very threads of my life could be in Viktor’s hands right now.

What have I done?

I’m still mad as hell at him for not telling me. I still have this bitter taste in my mouth left over from seven months of trying to make myself believe that Viktor’s disgusting blood wasn’t running through my veins, keeping me alive. I still want to tell Isaac just how angry I am that I’ve tortured myself endlessly because of this; worrying about how he might feel about me once he found out that I was bonded by blood to his enemy. I want to scream at the top of my lungs and get it all out of my system.

But then I want to spend the rest of what time I have left with him, being with him.

Because I’m going to end it all before it’s too late.

I won’t live like Aramei. I won’t. And with or without Isaac, I’m not going to.

I march quickly in the direction of the bicycle path and slip into the forest. It’s so different during the day, with the sun high in the sky, spilling through the tops of the trees and pooling on the blacktop path beneath me in splotches. My steps get heavier as I walk faster until I’m almost running toward the place where Alex and I were attacked.

And I stop.

I hear the birds chirping in the trees and the wind combing through the branches. The air is humid in my lungs, but the cover of shade helps to tame the heat.

This is where my life changed forever. Right here on the bicycle path branching out in three different directions. I look at each one and wonder if we had run this or that way instead of through the trees, would things have been different? Would Alex have never been infected by Ashe that night if we did just one thing differently?

But then I realize…I never would have met Isaac otherwise.

When my flight lands in Augusta, it’s raining. I know it must be around midnight. I catch another cab that drives me up the winding, dark streets toward Isaac’s house and every bit of the way I think only of him. As the double yellow lines on the road slither in and out of my vision, I picture the day I first saw him sitting in the back of Damien’s Jeep. I picture him at the skate park when I had my encounter with William and Ashe. Even then Isaac was watching out for me.

I think of the first time he spoke to me, the first time he touched me and the first time he kissed me.

And as the cab pulls to the end of the dark uphill driveway that leads to Isaac’s house, I try to picture what Isaac is doing right now, but all I can see is the way he looked when I saw him last, when I tore out his heart.

It’s pouring rain, but the cab driver doesn’t want to get his car stuck in the treacherous muddy driveway, so I pay him and get out and walk the rest of the way up. I’m drenched by the time I make it around the bend to see the house in my line of sight sitting at the top of the hill with the old well toppled out front. I trek my way through mud puddles and finally make it to level ground. My wet clothes cling to my skin, my duffle bag feels ten pounds heavier saturated by the rain that continues to pound furiously on me. Even my leather purse is soaked but I don’t care about anything right now except seeing Isaac again.

When I emerge from the blackness of the driveway and step in the subdued light funneling from the windows around the house, I see a figure sitting on the porch steps alone, his back arched over, his arms dangling between his legs, propped on his thighs at the elbows.

As if he senses me, Isaac looks up to see me standing in partial light.

I don’t move. I just look across the driveway at him, letting the rain pummel me, feeling it cool my face and roll over my forehead and into my eyes. I taste it on my lips.

Isaac stares at me for a long, intense moment and then rises to his feet. He takes only one hesitant step forward and the rest of his steps become swift. In seconds he’s standing in front of me, also drenched by the rain. He seems afraid to touch me, but I can see that it’s the only thing he wants to do.

“You didn’t even flinch…,” I say, “when I told you that Viktor was still alive.” My voice is forced over the loud pounding rain. “I’m so sorry…I’m so sorry for keeping it from you.”

He starts to reach out for me, to take me into his arms like he has done so many times before, but I see his arms harden and he refrains.

I let my bags drop to the rain-soaked ground and I stand solidly looking up at him, feeling the pain in his heart. I too start to reach out for him, but decide against it, maybe for the same reason he had, though I’m not even sure what the reason is.

“I was selfish,” I go on, my voice trembling, “I didn’t even stop to think about what my lie did to you, I was so shocked and wounded by yours.”

Once again, he starts to move toward me, but he doesn’t. It’s as if he’s waiting for something, maybe for me to tell him that it’s okay, that I want him to hold me. Or maybe he just wants me to say everything I want to say. I look him in the eyes, not letting my gaze weaken even for a moment. The rain washes continuously over my face, but not even it causes me to blink or look away from him.