Getting Wilde by Jenn Stark

Author:Jenn Stark [Stark, Jenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Goodreads: 26045106
Publisher: Elewyn Publishing
Published: 2015-08-18T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Kreios’s chuckle brought me back to my senses, and I stiffened. How long had I been sitting there, staring at him? Enthralled like a rabbit by the wolf. “Quit that,” I muttered, wishing there was more scotch in my glass. I felt like I could down the whole bottle.

What did I truly yearn to know, he’d asked, and too many options lodged themselves in my brain. Why is this happening, why now, why to me? And will it all end so horribly as it had before, with everyone I knew just…gone?

Unaccountably, my heart turned over,, thumping painfully as my life stretched out before me. My ragtag childhood, my mother’s boozy laughter—her love too impossible to predict, too ephemeral to grasp. The emerging of my own abilities out of nowhere, and Mom’s delight in showing me off to her friends, her neighbors and, finally, to the impossibly perfect cop who’d looked down at me without flinching and asked if I could help find a missing kid.

Don’t go there. Don’t ever go there. He’s dead to you.

But he wasn’t dead, not really. I felt his sharp presence every time I touched down in Las Vegas. He’d transferred there. Of course he’d transferred there, the one city I needed him not to be. He’d risen to the rank of detective now, and if he ever saw me… If he ever realized that I was alive, and that his frenzied search to find me after that horrifying day in Memphis had all been for naught, that the moment he’d given up on me and acknowledged I was dead, I’d been five states away singing show tunes at an RV campsite… I couldn’t imagine how much he’d hate me then. But I’d had to do it. I’d had to. No one else could die because of me.

They’re all dead to you.

“You should never resist your desires, Sara,” Kreios purred, and in my hand, my glass was suddenly more than half-filled with the glittering dark liquid.

I swirled it, the aroma of the aged spirits rising around me. “And this is real,” I said flatly, forcing my memories down to focus on the Devil and his tricks. “I could drink this, and it would affect me as much as any drink would. The flames burning those men—those were real too.”

He shrugged. “Did they seem real to you? Does the scotch taste real?”

I tilted the glass and took a sip, savoring the familiar burn once more. “Yes. But that’s not what I asked.”

“What is reality?” Kreios stood and stretched luxuriously, sweeping his hand around the space. I was drawn by the movement of his hand, watching it like it was the pendulum at the end of a hypnotist’s chain. “Is this airplane that Armaeus so generously provided us real?” he asked, strolling a few steps toward the bar before turning to me. “Is the air we breathe and the skin we inhabit real? Am I real?”

“Any of me?” A second voice sounded, and my gaze jerked back to Kreios’s chair.

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