Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [192]
Maybe it was just as well that she didn’t get a chance to finish. She was rambling anyway, too wired to sleep, even though it was almost midnight and her shift at the clinic would be starting in roughly six hours. She was awake, unnerved by the entire evening, and worrying over Ben, whom, she reminded herself again now, was a grown adult and not her responsibility.
She shouldn’t worry, but she did.
Aside from Nora, who never met a stranger, Ben was Tess’s closest friend. Her only friends, in fact. Without them, she had no one, although she had to admit her solitary way of living was by her own design. She wasn’t like other people, not really, and that awareness had always kept her separate. It kept her alone.
Tess looked down at her hands, idly tracing the little birthmark between her right thumb and forefinger. Her hands were her trade, her source of creative outlet as well. When she was younger, back home in Illinois, she used to sculpt when sleep eluded her. She loved the feel of cool clay warming under her fingertips, the smooth stroke of her knife, the slowly emerging beauty that could be coaxed out of a shapeless mound of plaster or resin.
Tonight she had brought out some of her old supplies from the closet in the hallway; the box of tools and half-rendered pieces sat in a cardboard file box on the floor beside her. How often had she retreated into her sculpting to distance herself from her own life? How many times had the clay and knives and awls been her confidante, her best friend, always there for her when she could count on nothing else?
Tess’s hands had given her purpose in life, but they were also her curse and the reason she couldn’t trust anyone to truly know her.
No one could know what she’d done.
Memories battered the edges of her consciousness—the angry shouts, the tears, the stench of liquor and heated, panting breath blasting across her face. The frantic pumping of her arms and legs as she tried to escape hard, grasping hands. The weight that crushed down upon her in those last few moments before her life tumbled into a chasm of fear and regret.
Tess shoved all of that out of her mind, just as she’d been doing for the past nine years since she’d left her hometown to start her life over again. To try to be normal. To fit in somehow, even if that meant denying who she really was.
Is he breathing? Oh, my God, he’s turning blue! What have you done to him, you little bitch?
The words came back so easily, the furious accusations as cutting now as they had been then. This time of year always brought the memories back. Tomorrow—or rather, today, now that it was past midnight—marked the anniversary of when it all went to hell back home. Tess didn’t like to remember it, but it was hard not to mark the day, since it was also her birthday. Twenty-six years old, but she still felt like that terrified girl of seventeen.
You’re a killer, Teresa Dawn!
Getting up from the sofa, she padded over to the window in her pajamas and lifted the glass, letting the cold night air rush over her. Traffic hummed from the expressway and on the street below, horns honking intermittently, a lone siren wailing in the distance. The chill November wind sawed through the screen, riffling the sheers and drapes.
Look what you’ve done! You fix this right now, goddamn you!
Tess threw the window wider and stared out into the darkness, letting the night noises cocoon her as they muted the ghosts of her past.
CHAPTER Thirteen
Jonas Redmond has gone missing.”
At the sound of Elise’s voice, Chase turned off his computer monitor and looked up. Discreetly, without letting her see his movements, he slid the utility knife he’d recovered several hours ago while on patrol with Dante into one of his desk drawers.
“He went out last night with a couple of friends, but he didn’t return with them.”
Elise stood in the open doorway of his study, a vision of beauty, even in the shapeless white mourning clothes that had been a constant about her