Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2)(66)

“Run, I said to myself.” Warner has picked up my notebook again.

“Please.” I’m begging him. “Please s-stop—”

He looks up, looks at me like he can really see me, see into me, like he wants me to see into him and then he drops his eyes, he clears his throat, he starts over, he reads from my journal.

“Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you’re a blur that blends into the background.

“Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and run.

“Run run run until you can’t hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.

“Run until you drop dead.

“Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.

“Run, I said.”

I have to clench my fists until I feel pain, anything to push these memories away. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to think about these things anymore. I don’t want to think about what else I wrote on those pages, what else Warner knows about me now, what he must think of me. I can only imagine how pathetic and lonely and desperate I must appear to him. I don’t know why I care.

“Do you know,” he says, closing the cover of the journal only to lay his hand on top of it. Protecting it. Staring at it. “I couldn’t sleep for days after I read that entry. I kept wanting to know which people were chasing you down the street, who it was you were running from. I wanted to find them,” he says, so softly, “and I wanted to rip their limbs off, one by one. I wanted to murder them in ways that would horrify you to hear.”

I’m shaking now, whispering, “Please, please give that back to me.”

He touches the tips of his fingers to his lips. Tilts his head back, just a little. Smiles a strange, unhappy smile. Says, “You must know how sorry I am. That I”—he swallows—“that I kissed you like that. I confess I had no idea you would shoot me for it.”

And I realize something. “Your arm,” I breathe, astonished. He wears no sling. He moves with no difficulty. There’s no bruising or swelling or scars I can see.

His smile is brittle. “Yes,” he says. “It was healed when I woke up to find myself in this room.”

Sonya and Sara. They helped him. I wonder why anyone here would do him such a kindness. I force myself to take a step back. “Please,” I tell him. “My notebook, I—”

“I promise you,” he says, “I never would’ve kissed you if I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

And I’m so shocked that for a moment I forget all about my notebook. I meet his heavy gaze. Manage to steady my voice. “I told you I hated you.”

“Yes,” he says. He nods. “Well. You’d be surprised how many people say that to me.”

“I don’t think I would.”

His lips twitch. “You tried to kill me.”

“That amuses you.”

“Oh yes,” he says, his grin growing. “I find it fascinating.” A pause. “Would you like to know why?”

I stare at him.

“Because all you ever said to me,” he explains, “was that you didn’t want to hurt anyone. You didn’t want to murder people.”

“I don’t.”

“Except for me?”

I’m all out of letters. Fresh out of words. Someone has robbed me of my entire vocabulary.

“That decision was so easy for you to make,” he says. “So simple. You had a gun. You wanted to run away. You pulled the trigger. That was it.”

He’s right.

I keep telling myself I have no interest in killing people but somehow I find a way to justify it, to rationalize it when I want to.

Warner. Castle. Anderson.

I wanted to kill every single one of them. And I would have.

What is happening to me.

I’ve made a huge mistake coming here. Accepting this assignment. Because I can’t be alone with Warner. Not like this. Being alone with him is making my insides hurt in ways I don’t want to understand.

I have to leave.

“Don’t go,” he whispers, eyes on my notebook again. “Please,” he says. “Sit with me. Stay with me. I just want to see you. You don’t even have to say anything.”

Some crazed, confused part of my brain actually wants to sit down next to him, actually wants to hear what he has to say before I remember Adam and what he would think if he knew, what he would say if he were here and could see I was interested in spending my time with the same person who shot him in the leg, broke his ribs, and hung him on a conveyor belt in an abandoned slaughterhouse, leaving him to bleed to death one minute at a time.

I must be insane.

Still, I don’t move.

Warner relaxes against the wall. “Would you like me to read to you?”

I’m shaking my head over and over and over again, whispering, “Why are you doing this to me?”

And he looks like he’s about to respond before he changes his mind. Looks away. Lifts his eyes to the ceiling and smiles, just a tiny bit. “You know,” he says, “I could tell, the very first day I met you. There was something about you that felt different to me. Something in your eyes that was so tender. Raw. Like you hadn’t yet learned how to hide your heart from the world.” He’s nodding now, nodding to himself about something and I can’t imagine what it is. “Finding this,” he says, his voice soft as he pats the cover of my notebook, “was so”—his eyebrows pull together—“it was so extraordinarily painful.” He finally looks at me and he looks like a completely different person. Like he’s trying to solve a tremendously difficult equation. “It was like meeting a friend for the very first time.”