Pain and despair devoured him inside, ramping up the rage.
How could they do this to him? How could they do this?
He yanked a door off one of the kitchen cabinets and let it fly.
It embedded itself in the bathroom door.
How many victims had they made him forget?
He yanked another off and threw it, the contents of the cabinets tumbling out and littering the countertops and floor.
How many lies had they told him?
He yanked another off and pitched it at a lamp.
He’d waited too long.
He overturned the heavy refrigerator.
Because he’d trusted them to tell him the truth and they’d lied, he had waited too long!
Liora’s bloody face again flashed through his mind as he tore off the oven door with a screech of metal.
What if that had been Emma?
He paused, breathing hard, the oven door clutched in his hands.
What if that had been Emma and Bastien hadn’t been around to stop him?
His grip tightened, compressing the metal and forming grooves beneath his fingertips.
What if he’d had a psychotic break and yanked the watch off Emma’s wrist before she could call Aidan?
He dropped the oven door.
What if Emma has been lying, too? a demon inside him snarled.
Cliff shook his head. No. She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t lie to him.
Everyone else might. But not Emma. Never Emma.
He glanced at the kitchen cabinets, their contents exposed now that he’d obliterated the doors. Stepping over the rubble, he thrust his hands into one and rummaged around.
Panic rose when he didn’t find what he sought.
Frantically, he searched through the pile of crap that had fallen on the countertop, then dropped to his knees and combed through the splintered wood, plastic peanut butter jars, broken glass, boxes of cookies, burst bags of chips. He tunneled through cold tubs of ice cream and frozen foods that had spilled from the overturned fridge, and—
There!
Cliff scrambled across the mess and grabbed the box of graham crackers. Hands shaking, he dumped it upside down. Two sleeves of brown crackers fell atop the mess, followed by a cell phone.
Cliff fumbled to catch it before it could hit the floor, then stood up.
As soon as he touched it, the lock screen lit up and Emma gazed up at him.
His hands shook so badly it took him four tries to type in the passcode.
While the voices howled for him to put the phone down and go fuck someone up, he swiped through the photos.
Emma smiling. Emma laughing. Emma teaching him how to knit winter hats.
They must have made a hundred of those damned things.
Emma speckled with paint and grinning as she brandished a wet paintbrush while they painted her kitchen cabinets.
Emma leaning toward him with a smile full of love.
Moisture welled in his eyes as he wondered how the hell he could tell her what he’d done, that Bastien had had to physically restrain him to keep him from killing a female immortal.
How could he tell her she’d been wrong in her fervent belief that he could win this battle?
How could he admit he’d waited too long?
He swiped to the next photo and the next, his heart splitting.
He’d just wanted to give Melanie and the others more time to find a way to heal him.
He’d wanted to have that happily-ever-after with Emma. To have the house and the picket fence and the children and the dog.
He’d been so focused on the dream… so reluctant to give it up… that he’d missed the moment when the monster growing inside him had snuck up and devoured the last lingering bit of him that she’d fallen in love with.
He swiped again.
A photo of himself grinned up at him.
THIS IS WHO YOU ARE, Emma had written across the bottom.
But it wasn’t, he acknowledged with utter despair.
Not anymore.
Agony engulfing him, Cliff tightened his hold on the phone until a spiderweb of cracks streaked across the screen, distorting his image. Then he slung it across the room.
It shattered when it struck the wall, tiny pieces scattering like buckshot.
Unfortunately, it couldn’t erase the image of himself from his mind.
“That isn’t who I am,” he murmured hoarsely.
He looked at the chaos that surrounded him, the destruction he had wrought, and saw again Liora’s bloody face.
“This is who I am.”
The voices roared in triumph.
Beneath them, a heartbeat sounded.
Cliff spun around.
Jared stood behind him. Reaching out, he touched his fingertips to Cliff’s forehead. “Sleep.”
Darkness fell.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Emma stared, unseeing, at the television.
Something had happened.
One knee bobbed up and down much like Cliff’s did when he was agitated.