Free Secret Unleashed: Secret McQueen, Book 6 by Sierra Dean

strange place to begin with, which made this that much more difficult. In the past, she’d used our connection—me as her patron, she as my ward—to communicate with one another on a subconscious level.
    For a moment I wanted to believe this was that kind of interaction. Somehow I had been wrong about her death, and she’d managed a miraculous recovery. Surely that’s what this meant. It couldn’t be my psyche playing cruel tricks on me.
    “You look sad. Aren’t you happy to see me?” She practically oozed warmth, her smile drawing me in.
    Tears stung the corner of my eyes, threatening to fall, but I blinked them back, worried she might vanish if I turned away for a second.
    “Are you real?”
    “I don’t know how to answer that. I’m here, aren’t I? So I guess I’m real enough.”
    “Are you alive?” I was trying to work around the elusive, often-aggravating dialogue of a dream.
    “I haven’t been alive for a long time.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “Do you know what you mean?”
    My dreams were a fucking nightmare sometimes.
    I reached out, hoping by touching her I could get a feel for what was happening. If this was a dream and not some communication from beyond the grave, I needed to know.
    But if she was really there, I needed to find a way to bring her back with me. Though I understood the impossibility of that, I was still desperate to try.
    When I touched her hand, her fingers turned gray and crumbled apart into dust. Her arm followed suit, caught on the breeze, and bits of her drifted onto the surface of the water then sank out of sight.
    “Oh. Look what you’ve done,” she said, her voice never losing its cheerful quality.
    I jerked back my hand in horror, hoping it would stop, but she continued to dissolve in front of my eyes.
    “I’m so sorry.” Now the tears fell, and there was no stopping them. I wasn’t crying for the loss of her in the dream, but rather the restored knowledge she was gone forever from my real life.
    “I was supposed to tell you something.” Her arm dropped away, and her chest began to crumble, exposing bits of rib before they too became ashes.
    “Tell me.” I wiped away pink tears with the heel of my hand.
    “The betrayal is not what you think.”
    “The…betrayal? What betrayal?”
    “Sometimes you misplace your trust, but then you find it again.”
    “Brigit, what are you talking about?”
    “You look really pretty in red,” she commented, and her gaze rested on my hands.
    Instead of being covered in her debris, my arms were coated with thick blood, all the way up to my elbows, dripping down in a puddle around my feet.
    “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “Someone else will clean up your mess.”
     
     
    When I woke up, I was still in the box.
    My heart seized as I stared into the black interior of the coffin, and in defiance of all logic I pushed out, scrambling against the velvet walls. I couldn’t stretch my arms fully in any given direction, and each time I tried to find purchase on something my hands slid off.
    So, of course, I attempted to sit up.
    My head thumped the roof, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Why had I let Ingrid talk me into traveling this way? How had Holden been so cavalier about the whole thing? As if being inside a coffin was no big deal.
    Considering how many people wanted me dead, I’d given them a perfect opportunity to come right to me. And now what? I was stuck in the coffin, unable to tell where I was or who was waiting outside. What if I’d been buried alive?
    Just the thought of it made my panic swell, adrenaline coursing through me as I clawed at the velvet and pounded my fists into the metal underneath.
    “ Let me out, ” I screamed, my voice raspy with terror.
    Something bumped against the coffin, and I went still, straining to hear what was going on. The lid creaked and lifted, filling the small space with an impossible amount of light. I squinted at first—momentarily blinded—but once I realized I had