✓ WICKED VOWS| JAKE (Book II )

59-The Bullet Joker

Anastasia's pov

I went down the stairs of my cottage, the soft creaking of the wooden steps eerily loud in the dead of night. The cottage was quiet, too quiet; the silence pressed in upon me like the weight of all the unspoken words, all the unwept tears. My hand trailed lightly on the banister, the smooth wood cool beneath my fingertips as I made my way to the living room. Everything was neat and clean, the result of throwing myself into a frenzy of scrubbing in the hope that somehow, somewhere, the pain would disappear if only I tried hard enough. But I knew better. No amount of order could tidy up the chaos that raged inside me.

It had been more than two months since that night since the tragedy. Two months since I had killed my husband. Or at least I thought I had killed him. My mother, Akira, had brought news to me that he had awoken from his coma, he was alive and breathing, somewhere far from here. The feeling of relief that washed over me upon hearing he was still in this world was immediately drowned by the knowledge he had been doing everything in his power to find me. The darkness of that knowledge hung in the air over me, like a shroud smothering in its intensity.

I knew Jake wasn't going to stop until he had me. I knew him well enough to understand that his tenacity was a double-edged sword. But I couldn't let him find me. I wouldn't. What would I say if he did? How could I possibly face him after everything I'd done? What emotion could I muster when I met the man I had nearly destroyed? The thought of seeing him again, of looking into his eyes—those eyes which had once held so much love for me—was just too much for me. My heart, shattered as it was, could not bear such a sight.

I had almost killed him. I thought I had killed him. It was like the incident happened yesterday. The image of him lying in a pool of blood-blood I had spilled-lingered on with endless torment. The picture of him lying there, lifeless, the sound of his labored breathing as it had grown shallower and finally stopped, whenever I shut my eyes flashed before them, reoccurred in my dreams. I was his undoing, the one who'd placed him in that precarious position from which he could very well never recover. And for what? Love? Betrayal? Some twisted, dark melding of the two?

That night I left him, I wept as I never had wept. My tears would not stop; they made burning tracks down my cheeks as the truth finally hit me: I loved Jake. It was the manner in which I loved him even as I destroyed him. It was more than I could stand. How could I love a person yet be his killer? How could I ever live with myself after that?

Each morsel of information about him was protected with care, salvaged as if it were some ancient treasure. I couldn't let him go, even as I ran as far from him as I could. My heart was a mess of contradictions and fear, guilt and longing. I was a living, breathing contradiction, a ghost of the woman I used to be.

The clock above the stove struck one past midnight as I poured myself a cup of coffee. The smell of it filled the small kitchen, but it did absolutely nothing for the raw edges of my nerves. I was already exhausted, my body craving sleep that I knew just wasn't going to come. I hadn't slept peacefully since that night. Jake's bloodied face haunted my dreams, making them endless nightmares from which there was no escape. Coffee was a poor substitute for rest, but it was all I had.

As I turned from the kitchen, the small living room extended before me; only the single lamp on the side table was on. The cottage was cozy to a fault, with two bedrooms upstairs and a living room that seamlessly segued into the kitchen through an easy island. Outside, the garden was lush and perched on the edge of a cliff that overlooked the wild beauty of the Australian countryside. It is a place that should be peaceful, but in reality, it is a gilded cage: beautiful on the outside, yet a prison nonetheless.