Page 123 of Angels Are Falling

I had stopped trying to understand years ago why I loved Amelie so fucking much. It was simply the weather where I lived now. But if you had put a gun to my head and made me name the thing, it was this. She could pick up the single most unbearable fact in the world and, in her two bare hands, turn it into a thing a child could hold on to and laugh at.

My legs stopped fully belonging to me—effects of the drugs and alcohol—and I let them quit. I slid down the cold iron until I was leaning against it, sitting in the snow, the bottle hanging loose from my fingers, the packet of cocaine somewhere on the ground. Amelie’s voice kept doing the one thing in the world I wanted it to—it spoke.

“Bella, look. Look. It’s snowing again.”

Bella had gone from crying to ecstatic. “Yay. Yay. Angels are falling from the sky. Mommy misses me.”

I let my head fall back against the railing and closed my eyes as I listened to their excitement.

The snow came down onto my face, each flake a small cold touch and then nothing, and then another, and another, faster than I could count them, more than any pair of hands could ever hold, a whole black sky of them turned loose and falling.

Angels, she’d called them.

They were falling on me, too. No one had sent them for me. Amelie could conjure a sky full of angels for three children who weren’t hers and a man she’d married that morning, but not a single one of them was meant for the man on the wrong side of the fence. I belonged to no one. My own parents had gone down without their son by their side, and one day, I would follow them the same way, and the only snow that would ever fall on me had been spun out of her mouth for the sake of somebody else’s grief.

But because it had come from her story, I tipped my face and let the snow cover my brow, my lashes, and the corners of my mouth.

I pretended.

The angels are falling on me because Amelie is thinking of me.

Nonetheless, I kept my hands down at my sides, because drunk and high as I was, ruined as I was, I knew better. That not a single snowflake had ever been mine to catch.

That made me want to laugh with bitterness just as much as it made me want to rip my heart out of my chest. I went over sideways into the snow and let my eyes close. Somewhere on the other side of the fence, Bella was still counting angels, and Amelie was laughing at something, and I lay in the cold and asked the dark for the only thing I had left to ask for.

End my fucking misery.

Please let it end.

Chapter

Thirty-Seven

STEFAN

I returned to my own house like a burglar.

The driveway told me Amelie’s friends were leaving. Caden’s rental idled at the gate as Rose spoke to Amelie.

Good. I needed to speak with Kai, and it was for the best if Amelie was occupied during the conversation.

I realized I was still holding the bag—a little cellophane zip with white powder, lighter than it had been a few hours ago—and I put it in my jacket pocket. The pocket was shallow. Some sober part of me noted that putting a bag of cocaine in a shallow pocket was a bad idea, but I overlooked it. My heart was going a million miles an hour. The papers I’d studied told me I had been right to suspect Kai. The powder had been telling me I needed to act.

My hands wouldn’t stay still. I’d been grinding my teeth since sunrise, and my jaw ached like a bruise. On the way through the kitchen, I caught my reflection in the patio glass—wild red eyes, a man the old me would have crossed the street to avoid—and I didn’t slow down.

The patio door stood open, and it smelled like ocean salt outside, the day obscene in its niceness.

“Bella. Boys. Go inside,” I barked, chest heaving.

Three heads came up. Bella’s face was still blotchy from laughing. “But we are making hamburgers.”

“You can eat it later.”

Jamie squared his shoulders. “I don’t want to⁠—”

“Inside. Now!” It came out with an anger I couldn’t seem to put out.

Bella stomped her foot. “Kai said we could⁠—”