“Why the fuck do you act like you want to die so badly?”
Her face slashed into what I imagined mine looked like, all carnal heat between us incinerating at the hands of one much hotter.
“Why the fuck would I want to live?” Agony burst in her eyes, neon green fireworks that burned them almost too bright. “With all of this.” She gestured wildly at herself, the veins in her arms seeming to glow a purple hue now that I knew about the flames trapped inside of them. “There’s just pain, James. There’s the fire and the constant reminder that I’m alone because I killed my brother and that I’m a fucking statistic of sexual assault. What about that existence screams happiness to you?”
“You didn’t kill your brother.”
It was the lousiest argument, but it was all I had to use.
Truthfully, I was scrambling, knocked in the head by how scary serious she sounded. There wasn’t a waiver of uncertainty or modicum of reservation in how she spoke about wanting to die.
From the moment I met her, she’d lived her life as if she had a death wish.
This was just the first time it felt so literal.
Palms flattened against my chest and shoved me back into the counter. “I made him get on the plane that killed him, so yes. I did.”
“Is that how you think he’d see it? Because I sure as fuck don’t.”
She moved herself away from the wall to parallel the front door. “You didn’t know him, so any opinion you have on him means jackshit, James.”
“I don’t have to know him to know that he wouldn’t want you to die just because he did. That’s weak, Scarlett. You’re not weak.”
She slanted her head, shadows haunting her gorgeous face.
“You don’t know what I am.”
I held my stance and her acute eye contact. “I know that your brother would be really fucking disappointed in you if he saw you sniveling for an easy way out.”
Before I even saw my words reach her, I regretted them. More than I’d ever regretted anything in my thirty-three years.
It was a sour pang, corrupting every nerve in my body with a cringe that knocked my teeth together. Fuck.
Then, I saw the exact moment they made their impact on Scarlett.
It felt like dying.
Watching the bloom of hurt ricochet around her face, parting her lips and watering her big doe eyes was what I imagined death would be like.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t reverse it no matter how badly I wanted to.
The damage was already done.
Her spectacular emeralds were split open at the center, shocked betrayal pouring out of the wound. Air wasn’t moving her lungs either, a gradual cave hollowing out the base of her thin throat as she refused to breathe. Wet ringlets clung red vines to her naked shoulders and suffocating chest.
She was as still as the dead she envied.
My heart was pumping at three times its normal pace, roaring to go to her and shake some oxygen into her lungs, to squeeze her waist until she gasped or fix my mouth over hers and force my own air into her lungs.
I’d give her all that I had, clinging to her until she clung back with signs of life even if it killed me.
I didn’t get the chance.
She moved before I did.
Right for the bottle of Johnnie Walker on the countertop.
She wound her fingers around the neck of it and lifted it above her head, sending it sailing towards the floor between our bare feet with a slashing screech.