Verum (The Nocte Trilogy 2)

Long black hair, big dark eyes.

Eyes like Dare’s.

Her whispers were always so soft.

“You can’t be together,” she’d told us. “It isn’t right. It’s not right. You know he can’t leave here.”

Dare can’t leave Whitley.

He can’t leave.

He can’t leave.

But he did.

I see it.

He came to get me because I lost everything.

And when we arrive here at Whitley, he lost everything too.

I see him with his mother in his arms,

Through the flames of a fire.

“Help!” he shouts. And Olivia is limp and dead. “Help!”

But no one could.

Because an accident is an accident is an accident.

“Was it an accident?” I ask limply as we stand in the crypts next to her name.

“You know it wasn’t,” Dare tells me, his voice so rigid and hard. “We drove her to it. It was us. It was us.”

I see Olivia screaming.

“You took him from me. He wasn’t yours to take. He’s not yours, he’s mine.”

In her eyes, I see madness.

I recognize it.

She’s the rabbit and I’m the rabbit and we’re both crazy.

I see her taillights leaving the house,

I see the fire.

I see Dare.

I open my eyes, and it’s painful.

“Your mother drove off the Seven Sisters cliffs because of us.”

Dare’s eyes contain things I’ve never seen before, levels of unthinkable sadness. He nods.

“Yes.”