Into the Fading Twilight (Starlight Grove, #2) (117)

An invisible fist closed around my throat the same way Travis’s hands had so many times. It made breathing nearly impossible, like sucking in fiery air.

“But no one came. Such a weak little bitch. Couldn’t even handle living in the dark for a year. Do you know how long I was in the dark? Nearly all my life,” she snarled, gripping my hair tighter.

“Please,” I whispered.

“Shut up,” Cora snapped. “You don’t get to beg. You ruined everything.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

She shook me like a rag doll, so much stronger than I ever knew. This woman I thought was a friend. This woman I thought was a victim, just like me.

“You just couldn’t die like you were supposed to,” she clipped. “Just had to get found. For a while, I thought you’d stay this fucked-up version of yourself. And something about knowing you were so broken worked for me. Helped. But then you had to start on your healing bullshit. You had to try to remember.”

It wasn’t my time in that dark hole I was trying to remember now; it was every interaction I had with Cora in the here and now. I tried to view it through this other lens, the one that would help me see things as they truly were.

“Who kept you in the dark?” My voice was raw, emotion clogging it, but I managed to get the words out.

Cora yanked my hair harder, taking me back several steps with her fury. “You think you know the dark? You have no idea. My cunt of a mother would lock me in my room the second I got home from school and not let me out until it was time to leave again. She’d starve me. Make me piss and shit in a bucket. If I hadn’t had Travis, I would’ve starved.”

I sucked in another pained breath. Brokenness didn’t happen in a vacuum. It sprouted from abuse and torture and pain. It festered when one mind twisted another. And a part of me felt empathy for Cora. A young girl so abused.

But that wouldn’t stop me from doing what I had to do. And when she shoved me back, I’d gotten closer to the poker. Closer to a way to defend myself.

And I would fight. I might’ve given up before, back when Kol was the only person keeping me in the land of the living. But now, I wanted to live. And I wanted to live fully.

“I’m sorry.” I let the honesty bleed into my voice. “I’m sorry she hurt you.”

“You’re sorry?” Cora sneered, yanking my hair again as she pricked the underside of my chin with her knife. “You don’t get to be sorry. I don’t need your fucking sympathy because I had Travis.”

A light dawned as we moved a little closer to the poker. “What did Travis do?”

A smile stretched across Cora’s face. Not a twisted one like earlier but a sweet one. A woman in love. “He helped me kill her.” The smile grew. “He mixed her favorite drink with a few little additives. It only took thirty minutes for her to start convulsing. It was something to watch. And I didn’t take my eyes off her. I made her see me when she died. Know I was the one who did it.”

Cora’s green eyes danced with glee. “Then we took her high up into the mountains, off Three Creeks Canyon Trail, and we buried her. No one ever found the body; we buried her so deep. And everyone felt so bad for me. They were all, Oh, Cora, how can we help? Poor Cora, what do you need?”

She scoffed in derision. “I’d take their handouts. Someone paying my rent through graduation. Another keeping my water and power on. More dropping off food. But Travis, he realized he liked the aftermath even more than the kill. He wanted to be in the thick of it while all the morons didn’t have a clue that he’d caused it.”

Everything started to come together, how abuse and cruelty had kicked off something in the two of them that could never be stopped once it was started.

I swallowed down the swirling panic. “Where’s Piper?”

“You’ll never find her. They’ll never find her. She’s going to rot,” Cora snarled.

No. She wasn’t. I’d never let Piper suffer my fate or worse.

I used that to spur me on. I threw myself to the side, yanking my hair free with a painful snap. I dove for the poker, but I wasn’t fast enough.

The blade plunged into my side, and I could only do one thing.

Scream.





CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR


Kol




ASCREAM TORE THROUGH THE AIR AS I RAN FOR THE house. I knew that scream. It was different than the one I’d heard at the hospital all those months ago, but I knew the owner was the same.

I pushed my muscles harder, my lungs burning like I’d inhaled pure flames. I took the steps two at a time and then skidded to a halt. I didn’t have the goddamned key. A million curses flew through my mind.

And then I simply acted. I punched my fist through the window next to the door. Fiery pain licked along my hand and arm, but I didn’t care. I reached through the broken glass just as the alarm started to sound.

Good. That was good. Law enforcement would answer the call. My brothers would get alerts on their phones. They would come.

I would get to Nova in time.

Hauling open the door, I ran inside, my gun poised and at the ready.

I knew there was something off about Cora’s story. I knew the timing wasn’t right with Reese’s wounds. But still, when I saw Cora holding Nova by the hair, a knife to her throat, shock rocketed through me.