The Evolution of Mara Dyer

He looked inhumanly beautiful under the lights. It almost hurt to look at him, but it would have hurt more to look away.

“I like pushing your buttons.” “You’d enjoy it more if you undid them first.”

He was terrifyingly cold, but I wasn’t afraid. Not of him. I took a step toward him. My voice was quiet, but strong. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What doesn’t matter?” he asked tonelessly.

“What you did before.”

“I haven’t changed, Mara.”

I stared at him, at his expression. I still want to lose myself, it said. And I began to understand. Noah craved danger because he was never in it; he was careless because he didn’t believe he could actually break. But he wanted to. He wasn’t afraid of me—not just because he believed I couldn’t hurt him, but because even if I did, he’d welcome the pain.

Noah was still chasing oblivion. And in me, he found it.

About feeling so numb to it and everything that I was sure I couldn’t actually exist? That I must be made of nothing to feel so much nothing, that the pain the blade drew from my skin was the only thing that made me feel real?”

His voice grew savagely blank. “You want to hear that I liked it? Wanted more? Or do you want to hear that when I woke up the next day to find no trace of any cut, no hint of a forming scar, all I could feel was crushing disappointment?”

About feeling so numb to it and everything that I was sure I couldn’t actually exist? That I must be made of nothing to feel so much nothing, that the pain the blade drew from my skin was the only thing that made me feel real?”

His voice grew savagely blank. “You want to hear that I liked it? Wanted more? Or do you want to hear that when I woke up the next day to find no trace of any cut, no hint of a forming scar, all I could feel was crushing disappointment?”

You will love him to ruins.

If I did, it would ruin us both.

.

Maybe it wasn’t. But even if it was . . . “I’m too selfish to leave you,” I said.

Noah pulled back so I could see his smile. “I’m too selfish to let you.”

“Then you will love him to ruins,”

“We didn’t anticipate that things would happen quite the way they did—as it was, we were lucky to be able to extract Jamie Roth, Stella Benicia, and Megan Cannon before they were seriously harmed. We just couldn’t get to Noah Shaw.”

I heard her wrong.

That was it. I calmly, slowly looked back at the board, and forced my mind to turn the letters into words, ones I could understand, ones that made sense. But all I could process when I read them now was:

Deceased.

Written under Noah’s name.

My mind repeated the words of the woman Noah had once called a liar.

“You will love him to ruins.”

All the pain I had ever felt was just practice for this moment.

“The roof caved around you, but not on you, Mara. Noah was too close, and he was crushed.”

“He will die before his time with you by his side, unless you let him go.”

“I’m very, very sorry,” Dr. Kells said.

What she was saying was impossible. Impossible. Noah healed every time he was hurt, always. He swore I couldn’t hurt him again and again and again. Noah didn’t lie. Not to me.

But Dr. Kells did. She lied to me about Jude. She lied to Jude about me. She lied to my parents about Horizons. She lied to everyone, to all of us.

And she was lying to me now.

I wasn’t sent to Horizons—I’d been brought. My parents had no idea what this place was; they just wanted to help me get better and Dr. Kells made them believe I would. When they thought I was getting better, they decided not to make me go to the retreat; they would eventually pull me out of the program entirely.

And the day they decided not to make me go was the night when Jude made me slit my wrists. But not to kill myself.

To get me sent back.

I heard Stella’s voice, just a whisper in my mind.

“They need you.”

They? Dr. Kells and Jude?