Breathless Read Online Free PDF

appreciate it then. I hate that I screwed it up.
    He cuts his eyes to me, and his brows pull together so tightly I could probably put a dime between them. “What gives you any indication that I’m okay?”
    Well then. “Well, you’re upright. You’re talking. You sound like yourself. You are… I don’t know… not foaming at the mouth. Your eyes aren’t black anymore, which was freaky as all get out, I just have to tell you. God, what did Mother do to you down there?”
    He opens his mouth… shuts it… then opens it again. He is still looking at me like I have five heads, which I don’t anymore because… human. “Mother? What does Mother have to do with anything?”
    It’s my turn to be confused. “Obviously there’s a miscommunication.”
    “Obviously.” He counters. “I didn’t see Mother, Hart. She wasn’t down there with me.”
    Ooookay… “Um… Yeah, so Hell can make you see what you want to see, what will hurt you worse than anything. It messes with you. Screws you up. Makes you go insane. And that’s if you are lucky. If you aren’t lucky, you remember everything and feel all the pain. But yeah… Mother. Mother said she was the one who…” I don’t want to say the word tortured because I’m not exactly sure what happened to Lucien down there, but I’d seen the aftereffects and whoa… not pretty. “That she didn’t do anything to you that she didn’t do to me.”
    “Then she lied.” Lucien looks at his fingers like they’re the most interesting things in the world. He laces and unlaces them, and his voice cracks like this is difficult for him to talk about. I understand. If there’s anybody in the world who can understand, it’s me. I never told anybody about my time downstairs. I told Gracen some, but not everything. There aren’t adequate words or feelings or emotions that can tell what it was like. So I never talked about it.
    I don’t know if Lucien will, but I’ll listen if he does. And I need to know about the whole it-wasn’t-Mother thing cause Mother said it was, or implied it was, and—well, it isn’t like she’d lie about it.
    Oh dear Lord.
    “It wasn’t her,” Lucien says again when I don’t say anything. I guess he couldn’t stand the uncomfortable silence. For me, I didn’t hear any silence. I heard lots of voices in my head. Totally normal.
    “But she said…”
    “I was there, Jessup!” Lucien yells, and the way his eyes meet mine—wild, big, scary, scared—I believe him.
    I also lean back because he’s so close, and honestly so forceful, that it makes me automatically lean away. I don’t even tease him about calling me Jessup. There are times for everything. This isn’t that time.
    “I was there,” he says a little more calmly as he seems to realize that he’s acting like a rabid raccoon and slinks back a bit. I hate seeing my brother like this.
    As much as I loved him, as much as I hated him, as much as I envied him when we were alive the first time, I never saw him as anything but strong. He was, he is my big brother. He’s always been larger than life to me. Even though I’m a little taller than him, he was never short to me. He always seemed so much bigger, so much older, so much of something that I wanted to be.
    I always wanted to be like my big brother.
    When I didn’t hate him…
    When I didn’t kill him.
    But now, I can barely recognize him. Not because he looks different. He doesn’t. Nothing has changed about his appearance since we were younger. But his mannerisms have. The way his shoulders slump and round, the way he shrinks back into himself. The way his eyes are hollow under them, which one would think would be expected from a former corpse, but this is different. This isn’t normal—and yeah, I get the irony of saying that. This is something that is mental, emotional. He’s changed. I’ve changed. I’m not sure all of it is for the better.
    My big brother, the one I’ve looked up to all my life, is sitting next to