Silence

can’t be trusted. With anything.” He hesitated. “I’ll come clean. I’ll tell you everything, but only because Hank double-crossed me. You’re not supposed to be in this anymore. I did everything I could to leave you out of it. Hank gave me his word he’d stay away from you. Imagine my surprise, then, when you told me earlier tonight that he’s putting the moves on your mom. If he’s back in your life, it’s because he’s up to something. Which means you’re not safe, we’re back to square one, and coming clean doesn’t put you in any more danger.”

My pulse hammered through my veins, my alarm running deeper than bone. Hank. Just as I’d suspected, everything led back to him. “Help me remember, Jev.”

“Is that what you want?” He searched my face with the need to know that I was absolutely certain.

“Yes,” I said, sounding braver than I felt.

Jev lowered himself onto the edge of the sofa. He unbuttoned his shirt carefully. Even though I was taken aback, instinct told me to be patient. Bracing his elbows on his knees, Jev hung his head between his naked shoulders. Every muscle in his body was rigid. For one moment, he looked like Phaeton from his painting, each sinew etched and chiseled. I took one step closer, then two. The guttering candlelight flickered across his body.

I sucked in a breath. Two jagged stripes of torn flesh marred his otherwise flawless back. The wounds were raw and red, and wrung my stomach into a knot. I couldn’t imagine the pain he was in. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to create such brutal gouges.

“Touch them,” Jev said, looking up at me with nervousness rising to the surface of those unreadable black eyes. “Concentrate on what you want to know.”

“I — don’t understand.”

“The night I drove you away from the 7-Eleven, you ripped my shirt and touched my wing scars. You saw one of my memories.”

I blinked. That wasn’t a hallucination? Hank, Jev, the caged girl — they were from Jev’s memory?

Any doubt I’d been dragging around vanished. Wing scars. Of course. Because he was a fallen angel. And even though I didn’t know the physics behind it, when I touched his scars, I saw things no one else could possibly know. Except Jev. I finally had what I wanted, a window to the past, and fear threatened to get the better of me.

“I should warn you that if you go inside a memory that includes you, things will get complicated,” he said. “You might see a double of yourself. You and my memory of you could be there at the same time, and you’d be forced to watch the events as an invisible bystander. The other scenario is that you’ll transfer into your own version of the memory. Meaning you might experience my memory from your own point of view. You won’t see a double if that happens. You’ll be the only version of yourself in the memory. I’ve heard of both happening, but the first is more common.”

My hands trembled. “I’m scared.”

“I’ll give you five minutes. If you haven’t come back, I’ll pull your hand off my scars. That will break the connection.”

I bit my lip. This is your chance, I told myself. Don’t run away, not when you’ve made it this far. The truth is scary, but knowing nothing is crippling. You of all people understand that.

“Give me a half hour,” I told Jev firmly.

Then I cleared my mind, trying to calm my racing thoughts. I didn’t have to understand everything right now. I only had to take a leap of faith. I held my hand out, part of the way. I squeezed my eyes shut, summoning courage. I was grateful when Jev’s hand closed over mine, guiding me the rest of the way.

CHAPTER 20

MY FIRST CONSCIOUS THOUGHT WAS OF BEING nailed down. No. Nailed inside. Locked in the snuggest of coffins. Tangled in a net. Defenseless and dictated by another body. A body that looked like my own — same hands, same hair, identical down to the finest detail — but one I had no control over. A strange phantom body that acted against my will, dragging me into its tide.

My second thought was Patch.

Patch was kissing me. Kissing me in a way that terrified me even more than the phantom body and its unbreakable hold over me. His mouth, everywhere. The rain, warm and sweet. The swell of distant thunder. And his body, taking up space, standing so very close, radiating heat.

Patch.

Astonished and shaken, I clawed at the memory. I begged to be let out.

I gasped as if coming up from a lengthy and punishing stay under water. At the same time, my eyes flew open.

“What is it?” Jev asked, grasping me protectively by the shoulders as I slumped against him.

We were back in his granite studio, the same candles flickering along the walls. The familiarity of it flooded me with relief. I was terrified of being trapped down there. Terrified of the sensation of being held captive in a body that I couldn’t command.

“Your memory was of me,” I choked. “But there wasn’t a double. I was trapped inside my body, but I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t move it. It was — terrifying.”

“What did you see?” he asked, his body tense enough to be made of stone. One hard push in the wrong direction, and he might well shatter.

“We were above here. In the shed. When I said your name, I didn’t say Jev. I called you Patch. And you were — kissing me.” I was too shocked to think about blushing.

Jev smoothed hair off my face, stroking my cheek. “Nothing is wrong,” he murmured. “Back then you knew me as Patch. That was the name I was going under when we met. I dropped the name when I lost you. I’ve been going by Jev ever since.”

I felt stupid for crying, but I couldn’t stop myself. Jev was Patch. My old boyfriend. It suddenly made sense. No wonder no one had recognized Jev’s name — he’d changed it after I disappeared.

“I kissed you back,” I said, still crying softly. “In the memory.”

The tightness in his face softened. “That bad?”

I wondered if I could ever tell him just what his kiss had done to me. It was so pleasurable it had single- handedly frightened me out of his memory.

To avoid having to answer him, I said, “You told me earlier that you tried to bring me here to your home once before, but Hank stopped us. I think that was the memory I saw. But I didn’t see Hank. I didn’t make it that far. I broke the connection. I couldn’t handle being inside my body but not being able to control it. I wasn’t prepared for just how real it would feel.”

“The girl in control of your body was you,” he reminded me. “You in the past. Before you lost your memory.”

I jumped up, pacing the room. “I have to go back.”

“Nora—”

“I have to face Hank. And I can’t face him here until I’ve faced him in there,” I said, thrusting my finger at Jev’s scars. And face yourself, I thought. You have to face the part of you that knows the truth.

Jev gave me a measured look. “Do you want me to pull you out?”

“No. This time I’m going all the way.”

The moment I arrived back inside Jev’s memory, I felt a switch being thrown, and the next thing I knew, I was reliving the flashback through the eyes of the girl I’d been before my memory was damaged. Her body overtook mine, and her thoughts overshadowed my own. I breathed through the panic, opening myself up to her — to me.

Outside, the rain made a metallic ping as it pattered the shed. Patch and I were