Free Blinding Light (The Bloodmarked Trilogy Book 2) by Alicia Deters Page A

lush.
    Her epitaph read Loving Daughter and Friend. Too generic. Whoever picked those words could have added some originality. She was befitting of so much more.
    I stopped in front of the stone and opened my mouth, but no parting words came to mind. A few awkward seconds later, I decided to plant my butt on the cold, upturned dirt and curl up with her awhile in silent reflection.
    The unyielding sun bore down on the earth and glinted off the newer, more pristine grave markers. The ground was bare, showing no signs of recent snow, but the freshly packed mound where I perched was frozen solid.
    It slowly thawed under my rear end. When I closed my eyes, the city noise faded, and my focus shifted to the breeze blowing gently across my face.
    It was a welcomed sting. My raised temperature provided protection from the cold, but the bite of it against my oversensitive nerves radiated through my body, leaving a wake of small shivers. I wore jeans with a zip-up hoodie covering a cream colored thermal, but the temperature was in the single digits, so I didn’t have much longer before the frost permeated my skin.
    Twisting my head back and forth, I slowly and purposely observed my surroundings. The environment served as a distraction, buying me time to avoid facing what was right in front of me, but the pull of my guilt and sorrow was too strong and impossible to ignore.
    Several quiet minutes passed before I finally owned up to my reality. Holly. Memories of that tragic night slammed into me, and I let them bulldoze me over, because I needed the full impact of it to remind me what I lost. I needed to remember my anger and rage, my helplessness and remorse, so I would fight even harder in the future to never experience that kind of loss again. That night was my ultimate low.
    The fear in her voice cracking through her tough exterior will haunt me forever. It wasn’t fair. She hadn’t done anything to merit such an awful and abrupt end. She was a good person. The best person I know… Knew .
    God, thinking of her in the past tense was worse than the spike that pierced my back on that same tragic night. But it was a bitter reminder of my last promise to her.
    “Hol, I swear you won’t recognize me by the end of my reformation. You might even regret wanting me to change,” I vowed.
    A breathy laugh escaped. Hell, I might regret it more than once before all is said and done.
    She always wanted more for me than I did. Holly wanted me to stop pretending to live and actually live, so I pledged to never deny my human side again. Come to think of it, I already regretted it. Raw emotion was a bitch.
    It threatened to crush me with the pressure of a car compactor. Emotional pain was so much worse than physical pain. It didn’t disappear or heal rapidly like my flesh wounds could. It was lasting and left scars that weren’t visible but could be seen by anyone looking close enough. All I could do was cover them and let time do its thing to mend me.
    After the last of my tears dried, I picked my chilled butt up off the ground and gave one more glance over my shoulder at the headstone. I wanted to tell her how much she really meant to me because I never said it out loud. I wanted to tell her she made me more human than I felt most days. I wanted to thank her for her unwavering friendship over the past few years. I wanted to tell her a million things, but that wasn’t what came out.
    “I’m an ugly crier, I’ll have you know. And I blame you for that.”
    My first ever tear fell in some sketchy back alley after her death. A death I couldn’t prevent.
    “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
    The sound of a throat clearing startled me back to the present. Gavin stood at the edge of the cemetery. I never heard him approach and wondered how long he’d been there, patiently waiting for me to finish. When I neared, his face remained hard like stone, but his eyes were bright and searching mine for any sign of tears.
    Luckily, I was able to push back