Mateo’s beautiful eyes blow wide.“Again?”
Chapter Ten
Mateo
Can This Be Home?
Ilead her back intomy room in silence as my mind spirals out of control.She sits on the butter-soft leather couch I have set against one wall, a look of pure haunting covering her features.
Again.
That word shreds through me like a sharpened blade through flesh.It cuts me deeply and wounds me in a way that I don’t understand or expect.
Her shoulders shake beneath the weight of it, and suddenly I know, whatever ghosts she carries, they aren’t just the kind that trail after the dead.They’re older, heavier.Human-made.Anger, red-hot rage, spreads through me at an unexpected rate, and I want—no, I need—to know who harmed this beautiful creature so I can repay the favor a hundred times over.
“What happened to you, mi alma?”My voice comes out low, broken glass wrapped in velvet.I am barely in control of the untamed emotions rampaging through me.
She laughs, looking through me.A harsh, jagged sound that doesn’t belong in her throat.“What didn’t?”Her gaze flickers past me, like she’s watching something I can’t see.“When I was fifteen, my parents had me institutionalized.They called it ‘treatment.’Said it was for my own good.But the truth?”She swallows hard, shaking her head.“It was a cage.A prison dressed in white walls and locked doors.They told me I was sick because I saw the dead.Because sometimes, I ...I spoke to them.To the echoes no one else could hear.My parents believed it.The doctors believed it.Everyone believed it.Except me.”
Her arms curl tight around herself, and for the first time since I’ve met her, she looks small.Fragile.But the way her voice trembles with fury, with grief—it’s the sound of a warrior who survived her own battlefield.
My heart breaks at the thought that the people who should love her unconditionally would think she is lying.What would she have to gain from making up such a ridiculous story?I know without a doubt she is telling the truth.Not because I know her well, but because being labelled crazy is the last thing anyone wants.
“I fought them,” she whispers.“Every single day.I told them I wasn’t crazy.But do you know what happens when you fight in a place like that?”
I don’t answer.I don’t breathe.My heart is pounding in my chest as she lays her greatest pain at my feet.I want to tell her to stop, that I don’t think I can stand to hear this, but I know she needs to say the words to start healing.And I need to know what happened so that I can finally start to understand the woman who is the other half of my soul.
“They make an example out of you.”Her lips twist into something between a grimace and a sob.“One night ...they strapped me down.Thick, hard leather cuffs on my wrists, ankles, and across my chest.I couldn’t move.I couldn’t even turn my head.And they left me there, Mateo.For hours.For a whole night.I screamed until my throat bled, but nobody came.Nobody cared.”
Her voice breaks, cracking against the silence between us.My fangs cut into my tongue as I clamp my jaw shut, tasting blood, fighting the urge to snarl.
Tears shine in her eyes, but she doesn’t stop.“Do you know what it’s like to be surrounded by shadows, by whispers of the dead, while you can’t even close your eyes to shut them out?To feel cold fingers brushing your skin and not know if they’re real or just your mind cracking in two?I thought I was going to die that night.Or worse...”She takes a shaky breath before she continues.“That I was going to lose myself.That I’d wake up and not know where the voices ended and I began.”
A sob escapes her lips, raw and unguarded.And something inside me snaps.
The desk I shattered earlier was nothing compared to the storm clawing through me now.Rage burns in my chest so violently I can barely think.My hands tremble with the urge to rip apart the people who dared do this to her, even if they’re long dead and rotting in the ground.I want to burn down the building.Salt the fucking earth where it stood.