Prologue
His blue eyes haunted me.
Every day they would haunt me. My morning, my day, my night, my dreams...those baby blues tormented me.
It has been five days since he left. Five of the longest days in my life.
He was right when he said I would never be the same, that I would never forget him. The way he could reach in and touch my soul with a single glance, an eyebrow quirk, or a smirk with that delectable mouth.
It was unfair that he approached me. He wormed his way into my cold, unforgiving heart and made it warm again. His appearance in my life made the sun rise and fall in my dark world, but now I was back in total darkness.
He disappeared without a trace, without a single word. One night I went to sleep in his arms in our bed, our cocoon, our sanctuary. The next morning I woke alone and unsure.
Where was he?
Why he had gone?
Why was his phone disconnected?
He caught my attention the moment our eyes met. His ice-blue eyes pierced my heart from across the room.
My life as I knew it changed the day that I met Brax. I’d never felt such love, my body had never felt such satisfaction, my soul had never felt such passion, and my life had never been so full.
Now he’s gone and my heart has never felt so broken.
When you had no hope, then had hope reborn, and then all of that hope disappears within a moment...where do you go?
Where do you go from there?
The moment I lost her forever was the moment I got in that car.
I knew in that millisecond that I would lose her, but I had no choice. My soul mate, my sole reason for being, my Elise. I knew there was nothing I could do that would make it right with her again.
It took everything I had to heal her the first time, to mold her back into the brilliant, radiant light she deserved to be. When I saw her photo I had to know her, had to get inside those gorgeous green eyes.
Knowing that I am the one who shattered her this time is breaking my resolve to stay away.
Knowing that my leaving was the end of the light and the return of the dark in her life feels like a knife being driven into my heart.
If only I could explain that I had no choice. Explain how they told me she would be safe if I left her.
If only I’d believed in us enough to stay.
I would have laid it all out for her if it meant she would stay untouched and unaware of the truth. Because if she knew the truth, the real reason why I was gone and why I even came into her life in the first place, life would not be worth living.
For all of us.
For them.
For me.
And especially for her.
Chapter One
Eight months earlier
Today is my first day of college. The first day of my new adult life.
You finish high school and think that you’ve hit the big time when really all you’ve done is finished one stage of your life so you can move on and start the next. Usually it’s a move sideways instead of forwards and sometimes backwards if you’re really unlucky. But sometimes you’re just standing still, even when you feel like you’re moving ahead, and it is really everyone else around you who is moving.
I’ve had this feeling of being at a standstill since I was sixteen. The day my parents and only sister were killed. It has taken three years, but I can now talk about it. If someone asks about my family, I can turn around and tell them that a stranger broke into my home when I was away at camp and shot my family dead. I often hear gasps or muttered apologies. Better yet, I sometimes get tears and awkward hugs from strangers who don’t know me.
I understand it should be upsetting, and it was for a while, but now I’m just numb. My feelings ran dry the day I came home to a house surrounded by yellow police tape and a guarded door.
I shut down.
I’ve simply been a vessel since then, an empty person ambling through life doing everything that was expected of me. I’ve learned that I don’t need hope and that I don’t need love. The only thing I need is to focus on putting one foot in front of the other so I can get through each day.
After the murders, I withdrew into myself. I stayed with Uncle Harry and his wife because I had no other family nearby and as my godparents, they were the next best thing. Life as I knew it died with my parents and sister.
The funeral was a highly publicized affair. I suppose that when a billionaire entrepreneur, his beautiful former model wife, and their ten year old daughter are brutally murdered, it is national news. But when the funeral was over and the search for the killer ran cold, the media went off to hunt the next big story and the people who had offered their sympathy soon returned to their own busy lives, forgetting about me. That left me with Uncle Harry and Sylvia in their huge empty mansion. Uncle Harry was unable to have children so he was never sure how to handle me. Sylvia, however, was always trying to help me and by the time I left for college, we were very close.
When I returned to school, most people didn’t know how to treat me. Some would look at me with pity, some would snigger at the popular girl turned orphan and some were opportunists who used what happened to try and bring me down a peg or two.
Unable to deal with the gamut of emotions I was facing, I rebelled against Uncle Harry and Aunt Sylvie. I stayed out late, drank and tried everything I could to make myself feel something, anything. I was emotionally numb and refused all the professional help that Harry and Sylvia offered me. In my mind, I didn’t need a therapist. I just needed something to make me feel again. Something, or someone, to make me feel alive. I hung out with the wrong crowd and went to college parties, waking up in many different beds with no recollection of the night before.
I was on a path to self-destruction with no end in sight.
One person was able to snap me out of my rut. She was a girl from school that had always been a loner, but for some reason felt the need to connect with me after the murders. Her name was Katie Jamieson and she had also experienced the loss of her family. Her parents had been killed in a car accident when she was fourteen and she had been in the crash with them, but survived.
When she saw my life spiraling out of control, she placed a letter in my locker. She didn’t offer any sympathy, but instead offered someone to talk to, someone who had been through a similar situation. Looking back, I can now say that Katie was one of the most influential people in my life. We weren’t friends for very long, but just being able to talk to someone else about what I was feeling, or not feeling as the case may have been, was exactly what I needed. She was a year ahead of me, so at the beginning of my senior year she moved to London to study literature and I was suddenly alone again.
I graduated from high school and moved across the country to the East Coast to study economics and business. I did what was expected of me. I had my father’s business to run after I finished my degree, a multi-billion dollar industry that he built from scratch.