A Need So Beautiful (A Need So Beautiful #1)(50)

I turn to Harlin. “I have to see him,” I whisper. “I promise it won’t—”

His face clouds over quickly. “Of course you do, Charlotte. Don’t let me stand in the way of your secrets.” Harlin breaks away from me and I’m devastated as I watch him leave. But at the last second he pauses at the glass door. He looks over his shoulder at me, his face drawn. Tired.

“I love you, Charlotte,” he says simply. And then he’s gone.

As the door closes I wipe at the tears that have spilled over onto my cheeks. I’m ruining everything by lying to him about the Need.

Monroe shifts uncomfortably. “Help me stop this,” I hiss. He glances cautiously at Rhonda, who’s watching us, before reaching out to grab me by the arm.

“Get in my office. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

I sit across from him as he opens his desk and puts the journal in there, locking it. He pulls a small bottle from his pocket and swallows a pill quickly from it. Then he looks up at me, his blue eyes narrowed. “You stole from me.”

“I had to. You wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“I told you what you needed to know.”

“Where are the final pages?”

“They’re not your concern.”

“The hell they’re not!”

Monroe exhales hard, and then studies me for a second with a look of disgust. “Take off your shirt,” he says.

I’m startled. “No.”

He tsks. “Don’t be difficult, Charlotte. I want to see what you’ve done to yourself. Show me your skin.”

He knows. Somehow he knows about my dying flesh, and suddenly I don’t want to show him. Anger wells up inside me.

“Come on,” he says impatiently.

“Go to hell.”

“It’s there, isn’t it?” he asks. “You feel the shadows on your soul, don’t you?”

My eyes snap to his and I nod slowly. “It’s hate,” I say. “I feel hate.”

“Let me see.” He walks around his desk to stand in front of me, his mouth a thin line of concern.

Slowly I unbutton the navy jacket, biting hard on my lip as I slide it off my shoulder. Monroe gasps. I turn to look where he’s staring. My gold—it’s nearly gone. The glow is replaced with something horrible. An unthinkable gray, so cracked and dead, like it’s sucking the life out of me—splintering the skin as I watch.

“What’s happening?” I cry out, truly afraid.

“What have you done?” Monroe stumbles back, knocking into his desk.

“The Need hit at the event, but I didn’t go to it. I helped Sarah instead. I thought that if I fought the impulses, this would all go away. That I could beat it like Onika did.”

“You’re fighting it?” he asks in a hollow voice.

“I don’t want to disappear, Monroe. I’m not ready to go.” I start to sob. “People are forgetting me sooner. Even Alex and Georgia. Even Mercy. I’m fading. And I’m not ready to go.” My voice breaks and I pull my jacket on and wrap my arms around myself.

“I can’t watch it again,” he says, almost to himself. “I can’t.”

I sniffle and look up at him. “Watch me dissolve?”

“No,” he says, like I’m confused. “Watch you fight to live. You don’t understand, Charlotte. You can’t stay here.”

“But I want to.” I sound like a begging child.

“It’s not possible. And if you fight . . . it’s horrible. It’s so horrible.”

“Is this what happened to Onika? Did the Need do this to her?” Was Onika dead underneath the beauty that I saw, like in my vision? Was the real her this grotesque?

Monroe squeezes his eyes shut. “No. The Need didn’t do this to her. The Shadows did.”

I stare at him, goose bumps rising on my arms. “What are you talking about? There was nothing in your journal about Shadows.”

My skin begins to itch, like a slow crawl stretching over me. It’s the spot. It’s growing. “What happened to Onika?” I ask. “I have to know now.”

He winces at the sound of her name, then takes in a deep breath. “I loved her so much. And like you, she wanted to fight it. But it ruined her.”

“What happened?”

“When she had first started losing her skin, we tried to cover it with makeup. But every day a little more of her was gone. Soon, no one could remember her anymore—except me.”

“How did you try to stop it?” Hope wells up in my chest. There could be something, a small detail, a piece of the puzzle that could cure me. If I figure out where he went wrong, I might have a chance.

“I tried a medical approach, combination of pills, toxins even. Anything that I thought could help. And when she started to hold back her compulsions, she told me it was working.” He looks at me. “But she was keeping secrets. Terrible secrets.”

His words make me think of Harlin and how he knows that I’m keeping something from him. “What sort of secrets?”

“That the Shadows had come for her, trying to tempt her away.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand. What is a Shadow?”

“A place devoid of light. A soul devoid of light. It will eat your glow and turn you into one of them. Walking Shadows.”