The Savior (Black Dagger Brotherhood #17) - J.R. Ward Page 0,44

was also funny and friendly, the kind of girl you looked forward to sitting next to at lunch because there was always going to be a good laugh.

She was not a mean girl. But this was a surprise.

Sarah would have thought, even if Bobby had had the bright idea, that there would have been a no-way from No-“h.”

Her prom dress had been hanging off her closet door, and she could recall how she’d looked over at it and started to cry. Her dad had taken her shopping two weeks before in what had been yet another in a whole line up of awkward I-wish-Mom-were-here kind of interactions. Like when Sarah had gotten her period for the first time. Or when she’d wanted to start shaving her legs. Or how about worrying whether she could get pregnant after she hooked up with Bobby for the first time, even though they hadn’t gone all the way.

The dress had been form-fitting and a deep red. Her father had approved of neither, but she’d wanted to come out as a woman for the first time.

No more girl stuff. No pastels. No frills. No big bows.

As she’d stared at the gown, she’d thought about how every night after she turned the light off, she looked at it and smiled, imagining all kinds of prom moments with Bobby, him in a tuxedo, her enshrined in red, the pair of them grown-ups at a big blowout. Dancing together. Making out. Maybe sealing the deal in what would be, for her at least, the first time.

Now? She could still go, sure. But the prom was just two days away and everyone was paired up.

And then there was the joy of realizing that they’d all gone in on the limo, eight couples, including No-“h”.

Who apparently had broken up with her boyfriend.

As the trickle-downs to the phone call played out—including the cringer that maybe Bobby had liked Sara all along and he’d just been waiting for the break-up to happen and the corollary sting that Sara should have called but probably wouldn’t—all Sarah had wanted was her mom.

Sometimes, you needed to bear your soul’s pain to somebody who had walked a mile in your sparkly high heels.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love her father. But he was a resource for other things.

The yearning for her mom, so familiar, so mournful, so ultimately going-nowhere, had just added to her crushing despair.

Sarah felt shadows of that now.

There were questions she needed to ask. Fears she wanted allayed. Choices to discuss. And not just with anyone. With Gerry.

She needed to talk to him about this. Ask him what he knew and what he had done. Demand to know whether he was the good man she had believed him to be or someone else entirely.

But he was gone, and there was nowhere to go with any of it.

She was alone with a baseless yearning, once again.

After so many years of being in this isolated spot, you’d think she’d be used to it.

Some destinations were ever new territory, however, no matter how well you knew their town squares.

No, it wasn’t Siberia.

But as Murhder re-formed at the outer fringe of a forest, the winter landscape before him seemed both cruel and pervasive. The snowdrifts across the meadow’s open acreage were like waves upon a restless arctic sea, the top layer carved into drifts by relentless cold winds. What trees there were seemed tortured by the cold, their bare branches like claws retracted in pain, their trunks starved and ragged. Overhead, a thick cloud cover suggested another blizzard’s battering was coming, the weather seeming to hate the earth.

About three hundred yards away, on the far side of the bare field, the shack cowering in the midst of a grove of stubby pines was not the cozy haven of a postcard. There was no wisp of cheery smoke rising from its tilted chimney, no glow of candlelight and warmth in its paltry windows, no strong refuge against the gales, given its frayed siding.

Maybe this was the wrong address.

Maybe V was mistaken—

As Xhex materialized beside him, Murhder shifted in the snow even though he’d been prepared for her appearance. Still, her scent in his nose was a strange shock.

Glancing over, he measured her grim profile. Her hair was even shorter than it had been when he’d known her. Her eyes seemed even darker—but that could be the situation. The rest of her was exactly as he remembered, powerful and sure.

They had said little before they’d left Darius’s former house

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