Breathless Read Online Free Page A

for his part, tilts his head to the side like he’s trying to figure out if I have some ulterior motive going on.
    I don’t.
    “You’re right, Seth. Whatever Gracen does, whatever she doesn’t do, it’s on me. You are her father and you made her, but when the time came, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill her like she wanted me to…”
    “She wanted you to kill her?” Lucien asks. He sounds shocked. I don’t know why. He knows what kind of person Gracen is… was. He had spent time with her. Had he expected anything else?
    “Yeah, she wanted to die so she wouldn’t hurt anybody. And me, being selfish, couldn’t. I thought… I thought if I could just keep her from killing her mother that she’d be fine. That everything would be fine.”
    “Because you love her.” Seth doesn’t sound snarky at all. He’s simply stating a fact: like blood is red and the sky is scary at the moment.
    “Because I love her.” I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud. It feels strange because I have no right to love her, but I do. “And I never thought she’d love me back.”
    “Apparently some part of her did.” Seth is still serious. I don’t like Seth serious. It makes everything seem worse when Seth is serious.
    I shift on my feet, trying to rationalize the unrationalizeable. “Some part of her loved Sam, yeah. And some part of her loved Willow. But not me.”
    “You were those people.” Seth helpfully adds.
    “Not really.”
    “To her you were…”
    “Just stop!” I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to talk about my feelings for Gracen or whatever feelings she might have for me. I don’t want her gone. I want to fix her.
    I want to save her.
    How do I save her?
    “What’s your plan?” I bite my lip and try to keep my leg from shaking from the nerves that are traveling through me.
    By the way Seth looks at Lucien, I don’t think I want to know.
    “What? What is it?”
    It’s Lucien who starts to talk first, but it’s Seth who beats Lucien to the punch line. “There is no way to stop Gracen. Gracen, the one you know, is gone. Her soul is gone.”
    “Gone where?” I stand up straighter.
    “No idea. That’s not the point, though. The point is that the Abomination is nearly unstoppable. I warned you about that from the beginning, but there might be a way to keep her locked up. Keep her from destroying everything.”
    “You said that was impossible.” He did. That was the whole prophecy thing. If she turned, the world died. Bam. Easy. Simple.
    “I didn’t say we had a good plan. But we can’t sit here and do nothing. We need the book.”
    “The book you used at the gates? The one that had everything Abomination related in it?”
    Seth frowns at me. “Hart, what other book could I possibly be talking about right now?”
    What other book indeed? “Well, I don’t know. Doesn’t God have some sort of other books that can deal with what’s going on? Have you talked to Him? Asked Him for His help?”
    “He doesn’t help,” Seth says with a tone that lets me know we ain’t heading down that conversation road. “Anyway, we need the book. Like I said, we can’t destroy her, but we might be able to stop her.”
    “Stop her how?” I ask when Seth has nearly left the room. He’s not going anywhere without me knowing the details. He’s not hurting her. I don’t care how evil she is. She loved me when I was the most evil thing she’d ever known. I’m not giving up on her. I’m not.
    “Stop her in the only way that matters,” Seth says. He turns and holds up his finger toward me. “And if you even think of getting in our way… I’ll send you back to Hell myself.”
    “Our?” I ask before Seth disappears. Stupid angel parlor trick.
    I walk up behind Lucien. “Our? Our what?”
    He doesn’t look at me, so I do the only thing I know to do—I turn him around. “Our what, Lucien? Please, you have to tell me the plan. He can’t hurt her. I won’t let him hurt