Something bitter stirs in my gut and I snap. ‘If that’s what you think of me, Amy.’
‘I don’t know what to think of you. But I do know buying the estate I live in is cruel. Nothing’s changed, it seems. We were best friends, Shepherd. Then one day, you decided to hate me and you never gave me a reason why. So whatever game you’re playing with me — play it with someone else. If you want to own Swan Lake — fine. Just have the decency to move out.’
Amy’s turned into a firecracker.
‘From what I’ve read on your notes, your therapy ain’t working. You’ve been living here for three years, Amy. I’ve sacked your therapist. He clearly didn’t have a fucking clue. I’m staying. So get used to it.’
I get lost in her pretty, sparkling, spitfire orbs. They look like the portal to Emerald City. I want to land inside them and explore.
‘What? This has to be unethical,’ she says. ‘The other shrinks, the staff . . . they won’t let you do this, surely?’
‘This place was running a loss, I saved their damn jobs. I pay their wages. They’ll do whatever I tell them to do.’
Her green eyes turn like black diamonds and she shakes her head. ‘What? What is it you want from me?’
This is when I lie. Lying is at the tip of my tongue in the darkness, caged inside my head. I am a lost wolf here. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. I can be anyone I want to be.
This is my Valhalla.
‘Nothing. I want nothing from you,’ I lie. ‘Like you said, nothing’s changed. My return has fuck all to do with you.’
She makes this sound like she’s reached boiling point. It’s a little huff, sweet and untainted. It gets right under the bitterness in my skin, like when you rub salt on a cut.
I don’t understand how she can even do that shit. Put that cute little infliction in her voice that instantly makes me half hard despite being in a goddamn mental health facility that stinks of bleach, death and piss, and every defensive wall I’ve erected against that very fucking thing.
‘I still get nightmares,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘I’m trapped in the woods. There’s nowhere to run or hide. The wolves are coming.’
I had demons, Amy. Bad ones.
‘I still get nightmares,’ she murmurs painfully. ‘So I stopped sleeping. Then the monsters got real.’
Amy’s the only one who can cut me right back down to size.
She’s on a hundred different kinds of pain right now and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. There’s nothing I can say that’ll put the past to right.
I gather my bones. I know my dead eyes are expressionless.
Who fucking cares?
I’m not Christlike.
‘Why am I not surprised that there’s nothing you have to say on that?’ she says. ‘Don't you get it? I hate you. I bloody hate you! I died that day the snow fell.’
‘Is that what you need, baby? You want to remember what I stole from you?’
‘Does it turn you on so much to hurt me that you’re willing to destroy me, all over again? No, don’t answer that. I don’t care what’s going on in that sociopathic head of yours. Take your black twisted heart and leave Greystone. Stay the hell away from me.’
Her eyes leave mine to vanish round the end of the corridor.
Despite knowing it’s the truth, I don’t want those to be the last fucking words Amy ever says to me and I feel my heart die at the thought. Every moment, every fucking moment shared between us in the children’s home reduced to dust with those emerald eyes glowering at me, begging me to stay the fuck away from her. To do the one thing that will get my soul back — leave her the hell alone.
I’m a sadistic fuck of a human being. I won’t stay away this time.
You’re broken, Amy. I did this. Can’t undo that.
She just wants me to be the scary, dangerous motherfucker wrecking her world. I'm not supposed to be the hero in her happily ever after.
I’m your poison.
You are my cure.
I don’t want fucking salvation.
Amy’s always been my obsession.
Now, it looks like . . . I’m her enemy.
4
YOU
LYING ON MY BED, I can still feel the tremors Shepherd left in his wake. It’s left a trail of destruction in my heart.
He is a fever, he sickens me.
Losing my best friend in Shepherd was my crucible. It changed me when I was a teenager. When you love someone as much as I loved him, with all of your heart, then you, you can't just turn that emotion off when they’re taken from you. You still feel things as deeply, and if . . . if it can't be love that you feel, then . . . then it becomes hate.
I can’t sleep, I drown in the stench of stewed cabbage and bleach permeating from the walls of the old estate.
My sister was hurt bad on the night of my seventeenth birthday. My memories comes in pieces, like looking through a kaleidoscope.
I remember I was in the kitchen. The table was set for a birthday party with a cake shaped like a heart. It was time to open presents. Dad gave me a camera, a special one. It was his when he was a boy. His special possession. Then it was Elizabeth’s. And now, he was giving it to me.
I remember my sister’s hurt and anger. ‘You can’t give Amy that camera! It’s not right, Dad. You promised you wouldn’t. How can you do this?’
It was her camera, her special prize. She spent hours in
