Table of Contents
PART I: UNCLOUDY DAY
PART II: WASHED IN THE BLOOD
PART III: ME AND MY HOUSE
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Don’t you know where I’ve been?
Don’t you know what I’ve done?
I know what you think,
But I’m not the one.
~from “The Hell Alone” by Tough Whitney
PART I: UNCLOUDY DAY
Tempie
My vision shrank to the steps, my twin trying to stand, trying to pull herself up. Blood trickled down the one face in the world identical to mine. I took a step toward Desty, shock thrumming through my veins. Kathan hadn’t meant to hurt her. Not really.
Kathan? I thought. What—
He grabbed my arm and turned me toward the mansion’s huge entry doors. Then I wasn’t outside anymore, but in our suite. He opened the bedroom door and shoved me inside.
I reached for him. Babe?
He didn’t answer, just shut the door. At the same time he closed himself off to me, leaving me empty and alone.
I swiped the closest thing I could lift and launched it. Screw shock. He was mad at me? Well, I could be mad, too. A wing-backed chair splintered against the foot of the four-poster we’d made love in so many times. I could make his anger look like a kid pouting. I could tear this world apart.
Fat. Ugly. Stupid. The worst of your family. Troublemaker. Screw-up. Whore. You caused this.
The pain was back. I’d tried to skip over it, go straight to the anger, but it was flooding in.
Desty is bleeding because of you. Your sister. Your twin. Your other half. And it’s all because she tried to help you, tried to save you. You’re not worth saving. You’re the reason Dad had to leave. He couldn’t stand to put up with your shit anymore. All those fights he couldn’t win with Mom about the way you dressed, the way you acted. You made him leave.
That coward ran! I told him what was happening with Leif, gave him the chance to be the family protector—he could’ve stopped it, but he ran off with Gianna instead.
You wanted him to save you? You couldn’t save yourself! You ruined their lives—Dad’s, Mom’s, Desty’s—and you think you’re worth saving?
“Come back, Kathan,” I begged. “Please, babe, don’t leave me here.”
I had spent so much time before I met him trying to feel nothing that the first day he enthralled me, I kept breaking down in tears. I hadn’t realized I could feel good. I’d thought the best I could do was numbness or impotent rage. That whole first day we were together, we holed up in his room while he held me. He told me that he’d already seen every part of me, every broken piece, but he loved me anyway—that he loved me because of my broken pieces. He wanted me. All that day, Kathan held me and talked to me while I cried and cried.
Of course, there was the sex, too. Before Kathan, I’d thought it was wrong, the way that boiling black ball of fury opened up inside me every time a guy touched me, that I should be feeling something different, like love or horniness. I thought I was the screwed up one. The first time we made love and I tried to shut off, Kathan stopped me.
“Don’t try to block it out, Temperance,” he’d said. “Be angry. Unleash hell. Feed on it. But never hold back. You’re not going to hurt me.”
So I did. I hit him and scratched and bit and screamed until my throat was raw. He loved it. He loved me.
Kathan understood. He had lived out his existence in a perpetual state of anger so deep and so intense that the universe could barely contain it. He and I were made for each other.
I lowered the vase I’d been about to launch at the bedroom door. I knew first-hand that there were different sides to anger—fury, fear, pain, frustration—and I had seen inside Kathan’s mind deeply enough to know that this wasn’t fury. It was desperation.
“Kathan?” I called, and this time my voice was soft. I reached out to his essence. Babe?
No response.
Don’t shut me out, Kathan. I love you. You know I would never leave you. Don’t leave me.
Temperance. His presence poured into me, forcing out the anger and washing away the pain. There was only his love and power. Even though he wasn’t in the room, I felt his scorching body nestle against mine, his muscled arms holding me to his chest. His wings enfolded us. The world around me disappeared in the perfection of his embrace.
Then, like it sometimes did, Kathan’s mind split into pieces. There was the piece holding me, focusing on me, centering all of his love and attention on me—but at the same time, there was another piece.
Once before, when I begged him, Kathan had let me see all of the pieces he kept of himself. There were millions. They weren’t broken and jagged like my pieces, but entirely self-contained and smooth, as if the sharpest edges had been worn down by time. At first, I’d thought I would go insane at the amount of data and sensory information coming in, but he’d brought me back down to only the piece of himself that focused on me until I could think again.
It’s addictive seeing the world the way he does. Exhausting, overwhelming, but addictive. You see and feel and experience everything all at once. You feel powerful, like there’s no part of yourself left, like all you are is knowledge of the things around you. As soon as I’d recovered from that first dose of Seeing, I wanted to try it again. It felt like forever before Kathan let me, and the second time he only allowed me to follow a fraction of his pieces,
