A Love So Deadly Read Online Free PDF Page B

me one of them?”
    “One of the monsters?” Gabe asks, reading my mind the way he does sometimes. “No. Not even close.”
    “Are you sure?” I ask, suddenly needing the assurance, making me wonder if maybe I am in shock, after all, and if any minute my fragile calm is going to come crashing down all around me.
    “No, you’re an angel, the scary, beautiful kind,” he says, lifting his hand to my face, cupping my cheek in his warm palm. “You are…the most beautiful person I’ve ever met, inside and out. I love you, and I wouldn’t have you any other way than the way you were tonight.”
    Tears slip from my eyes. “Is it okay that that’s enough for me?”
    “Yes,” he says with such surety that I’m able to pull myself together with only a nod and another sniff.
    We drive home in silence to find Danny sitting on the front porch with one of the pay-as-you-go cell phones Gabe bought under an alias clenched tight in his hand. Even in the heat of the moment, Gabe was careful to make sure the call to the police wouldn’t lead back to our family, and Danny was level-headed enough to follow directions.
    Or crazy enough. I can tell Danny realizes something bad went down, but he doesn’t ask any questions. He just throws his thin arms around me and hugs me tight before doing the same to Gabe.
    I look over to see Gabe’s big arms cradling my brother to his chest and I have an eerie feeling that Danny is like me, like Gabe, that whatever is missing inside of us is missing from Danny, too, but it doesn’t scare me the way it would have even a month ago.
    Maybe more people are missing whatever this is than we think. Maybe other people aren’t near as good or pure or kind as they would like to believe. Maybe Gabe was right that first night in Sherry’s car, and none of us truly know what we’re capable of until we’re put in an impossible situation, until we step over the line and realize things aren’t so very different on the other side, after all.
    Whatever the truth is, I know Danny will be okay. He has me, and he has Gabe, and we’ll help him figure out how to walk a path that is good and honorable, even if it isn’t always a path other people would approve of. It can be done; I believe that. Anything can be done with people who love you by your side.
    Half an hour later, it is almost three o’clock in the morning and Danny is tucked back into bed and I take Gabe’s hand and let him lead me into the bathroom to wash away the stains of the day, to spend one last night letting all the questions lie before the sun rises and exposes all our secrets to the light.

CHAPTER FOUR

Gabe
    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments. Love is not love
    Which alters when it alteration finds,
    Or bends with the remover to remove:
    O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken. -Shakespeare
    She’s still crying, though I’m not sure she realizes it.
    Tears stream soundlessly from her eyes, like a leaky faucet that refuses to be turned all the way off. There have been times when the tears have been worse than others, but they haven’t really stopped since we left Pitt’s house.
    She says she’s okay, but I can tell she’s not.
    And why should she be? She was almost killed, maybe almost raped, too—I haven’t worked up the courage to ask her about that. I don’t want to know. I’m afraid it would make my head start exploding all over again.
    Stress seems to play a role in the blackouts and dizziness. If I want to be here for Caitlin tonight, I have to remain calm, and hold my shit together. I can’t think about the fact that I’m dying, or that I’m going to leave her alone to carry the weight of what happened tonight all on her own. I can’t think about Danny’s thin arms trying to gather Caitlin up and hold her together. No matter how tough he is, he’s just a kid. He clung to me tonight like I was his dad, not some idiot barely eight years older than he