Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 75539 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75539 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
A lump of ice formed in my chest at the way Xavier’s voice hitched. “What happened?”
“He had a rare form of lung cancer. Took him out two weeks after his diagnosis. I remember him complaining about a cough, me telling him it’s nothing. He’ll be fine. We were supposed to go on a trip to London, his favorite city. I was going to propose at a dinner in the highest skyscraper in all of London. He never even made it onto the plane.”
“That’s so incredibly unfair. Fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“And then I lost my mom a year later.” He remained as solid as a marble statue except for his bottom lip. It twitched in a way that yanked at my heart. “That’s how I know you can never get used to death. You can’t ever even understand it. You just live with it.”
“Live with death.”
“Exactly.”
“X, I’m really sorry.”
“It’s alright.” He offered me a smile that made me believe him, except for an echo of that twitch at the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t okay. Xavier still felt the pain from his losses, deep and throbbing pain. “Let’s get comfortable and watch the rest of the movie. We’ve had a really long few days. I’m down to just turn off and relax. That sound good?”
“I think that sounds great,” I said. He lifted an arm, and without much thought, I lay down, resting my head on his chest. The gentle, slow beats of his heart were a nice backing track to the movie we settled down to watch. Today might have been terrible, but tonight proved to be the complete opposite. I’d discovered a lot about Xavier, much more than maybe I should be discovering, and I found myself wanting to unearth even more. I wanted to keep talking to him until the sun came up. I also wanted to help him heal from his pain, still clearly raw.
Ten minutes into the movie and we had somehow maneuvered ourselves into a little-spoon, big-spoon position on the spacious couch. Sleep came quickly, knocking me out before my favorite part of the movie.
Didn’t matter, though. The dreams I had, all starring Xavier, beat out any film ever made for Best Picture.
Chapter 13
Back Home
Xavier
Bambi, the family saber cat, purred herself to sleep on my lap. Her head was tilted to the side, so her long teeth weren’t at risk of poking my leg. I divided my attention between scratching her back and scrolling down the web page I’d been reading for the last hour. I sat outside under the shade of a bushy palm tree. Cassius sat across from me, flipping through a leather-bound tome he had pulled out of Damien’s horde. The pages crinkled loudly as he flipped them.
We’d been back at the Malibu castle for a week. There hadn’t been any new attacks, although the nation still reeled from what they dubbed the Kind Day Massacre. The president was still in critical condition, which made everyone hold their breath. I wondered what Blake must have been thinking about it.
He’d been a little distant from me since that morning he’d woken up in my arms on the living room couch. We’d woken up before anyone else in the house had, so after a moment of wondering if it was real or not, we untangled from each other and went to our separate bedrooms.
I lay there giddy like a kid on Christmas morning.
But had Blake? He wasn’t exactly the smoothest with his emotions or how he delivered them to others, but I couldn’t get a read on why he was acting icy. He sat far from me during our family dinners, didn’t chat with me as often, and declined a couple of my invites to go spend some time around Malibu. I knew he didn’t like to feel contained anywhere. I didn’t want this castle taking on the appearance of a prison.
But he had said no. Said he wanted to continue researching the starlight dagger. Which, in all fairness, was the more helpful thing to do in our situation.
It still bugged me. I twirled the silver bracelet around my wrist, starting to get distracted. The research wasn’t wielding much useful information, at least none that Cassius hadn’t already told us.
“Find anything?” I asked Cassius. He lifted his sunglasses onto his head, pushing back his long blond hair. He had a birthmark on his left eyebrow, turning the hair bleach white. He was an easy guy to trust. I could see why Blake considered him his best friend.
“Nothing new, no. It talks about how Gael the Blessed Marvel created the dagger and how he tried to use it to go back in time to save his son. It says how he failed, and it was lost in the Iron War, before the treaty was formed.”