OMINOUS: Book II (Ecstasy 3), page 1
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by KV Rose
Copyright © 2022 by K V Rose
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For more information, please contact authorkvrose@outlook.com
Cover design © Ashes & Vellichor (Ashlee O’Brien)
Edited by: Amy Briggs
To 17-year-old me. It hurt so good, but here we are.
I write everything to music. In a past life, I was a SoundCloud rapper. Check out the playlist on Spotify.
I highly recommend you read Ecstasy and Ominous Book I before reading this book.
We continue where we left off in Book I, and there is no recap. As I mentioned previously, I am not sure I would call this a “romance.” I stand by that statement for part two of Eli and Eden’s story.
It also isn’t a book with all the answers. As mental illness often doesn’t have clear reasons or logic, neither does this story. You probably won’t get the ending you want. You might hate me for how it all goes down, because you will still have questions.
Eli and Eden meet again in Sinister, and I hope, after this, you’ll also come along for that ride.
Please take care reading. This book is for mature audiences, and it was hard to write, so I can only imagine for some, it may be difficult to read. Thank you for taking the time to do so.
1
Eden
I get lost in the forest.
The one behind my house, another in my head. I hear a branch snap beneath my sneakers, but it’s muffled, as if I’m not really here.
Physically, there’s one foot in front of the other.
Mentally, my mind goes much faster. I could be running, really, because the woods are a blur anyhow. My heart pounds fast. Somewhere, as if detached, my hands are curled into fists.
“Why do you flinch every time I touch you?”
“You could get hurt.”
“Fuck you too.”
“Do you ever see God?”
The trailer is long gone at my back, the sky is darkening, strips of purple and indigo light drifting through the trees. Somewhere, a bird caws, and a light breeze skitters along dying leaves. It’s been fall for some time, but it seems the seasons are just catching up in North Carolina.
I see a pale, smooth stump, large enough to sit on, to bury my head in my hands and just exist, but I keep going, deeper and deeper, even as the temperature sinks and the sun along with it.
It’s past dinnertime, Reece is working late, and Mom was watching TV in their room. It’s been three days since my fight with Eli.
Sebastian is away.
I feel like I can breathe a little easier because of it, and I hate myself for the relief. I should want my brother home. I should want him safe.
But he’s starting to scare me. Just like I’m scaring myself.
Three days.
No calls, no texts, either to or from Eli, and to say I don’t care would be a lie. But I can’t breathe around him, and I can’t think when he’s close, and I need space.
I feel shame, thinking of what I did to him. I don’t know what came over me, but I haven’t slept much since, regretting it. I haven’t slept at all since Sebastian’s high ran me out of his room.
I don’t want to think about it. I know he was just doped up or… something.
I don’t want to deal with it.
A leaf crunches under my shoe, and even though it’s a sound I made, it startles me. I stop walking and look over my shoulder, my adrenaline spiked.
There’s nothing but darkness.
I can’t shake the feeling though, that someone is there. I almost want to run home.
Instead, I tilt my head back, the canopy thin and frail, dark sky moving in for the night. I imagine another state, another horizon, another life where I can reinvent myself. I become someone else. I’m not poor and my brother isn’t a druggie, and I don’t carry burdens from things I barely remember.
My phone buzzes in the pocket of my jeans.
The flinch is instinctual. A disruption of my single moment of inner peace.
Still, I reach for it like a lifeline. When I pull it out, it’s not the name I want on my screen.
It’s Amanda.
Her: Miss you. Thinking of you. Let’s talk this week?
My mind goes to Zachary. Amanda and I should talk. Maybe I should do something decent for once and warn her, even if I don’t think she’ll believe me. I could try. But aren’t people capable of change? Was it even really that bad? Is it even a big deal?
I’m not sure.
Then I think of what Eli would do to Zach if he ever met him, despite the fact he only knows the barest, skeletal facts about what happened to me.
It makes me feel justified somehow, in the shitty feelings I have about the entire thing. The humiliation balling up inside of my throat, even now, so many years removed from it.
I keep my phone in hand, but lower it by my side, spinning around in the woods, trying to clear my head. I can’t see the trailer park from here, but I know where to go. I just don’t know if I want to go there. I have an early shift at Fit4Ever tomorrow.
Today is the last day of fall break. Then the weekend. Trafalgar again after.
I should be in bed at a decent time, to get ready for work and prepare to be up early in the coming days for school, but I don’t want to sleep.
I don’t want to stop moving either. It’s restless and anxious, my energy. It could be tamed by the boy whose soul is tangled up with mine, but I can’t go to him.
Breathe.
I need to breathe, and sometimes with him, I can’t.
I keep walking, uneasy thoughts roaring in my brain over pragmatism, over knowing what I want, and how to get it, and becoming intoxicated with Eli Addison, drunk on possibilities, sidetracked by dreaming.
I don’t know how long I walk. I don’t look at my phone, no one else texts, and I don’t think about the time. The darkness descends completely, and it pricks at my senses, the fear of being followed enough to make me squirm in the night.
But it’s only when I reach the end of the trees, flatlands edged by a barbed wire fence stretching ahead, that I stop.
I could potentially turn right, or left, and head around the fence, but the single light on in the barn some yards away tells me this is where my stroll ends, lest I be assaulted by sheepherding dogs, or charged at by a farmer wielding a shotgun.
Sighing, tightening my ponytail after I push my phone back into my pocket, I turn around. The walk back will burn energy. Maybe it’ll clear my head. Maybe I’ll sneak in Sebastian’s room to find a sleeping pill. I’m sure he’s got something lying around, or maybe he keeps everything on him. Or maybe… he uses it all as soon as he gets it.
I blink in the darkness, getting my bearings, trying to clear my head.
Then… I freeze.
Retreat one step. Two.
There’s a shadow.
No, a figure.
Is it real?
I blink, scared of my own mind. Sometimes, I’m not sure I know what’s real. Like my anger with Eli, I can’t recall if it’s justified. Did he deserve it? Am I insane?
But the shadow steps forward, and my heart slams faster inside my chest with the recognition.
What are you doing here? How did you find me? They all seem unnecessary questions. It’s Eli. By virtue of being Eli, I answer them myself.
I can see little of his expression, only the dark edges of his hair, darker than the new night, and the gleam of his eyes, not green in the dark, but my mind fills in the blanks. I have every detail of him memorized.
“Is this a distraction?” He gestures with one hand, indicating the woods.
I glance at the sky. The stars. This is a reprieve. I take a breath, but I don’t hesitate any longer with my words. “I think we should spend some time ap
He drops his hand, but he doesn’t speak. I keep looking up.
After a moment, he replies. “You think we should spend some time apart.” He echoes the words in a flat tone, incredibly slowly, and with cadence. Like a poem.
I dip my chin, tilting my head. For some inexplicable reason, maybe as a lifeline, I pull my phone from my pocket and wrap my fingers tighter around it.
The night wind snakes over the back of my neck. Leaves whisper among the trees.
I reach my fingers to my face, the indentations left from his nails against my skin. It’s absentminded, but when I feel the smallest dip beside my eye, it’s a reminder all the same. I know what I did to him too. We’ll tear each other apart. We’ve already started to unravel one another. It’s best if we tie off the strings now, and continue with what we have left separately… isn’t it?
I drop my hand by my side. “Yes.”
He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. We stare at one another’s shadows in the darkness and somewhere a wolf howls. I’m not afraid and neither is he, but like with everything about us, it feels like an omen.
“Tell me why.” His quiet is eerie.
“Things got out of hand at the hotel. I know I’m partly to blame. I accept it. But we need space.”
“You need space.” It’s not venomous. I wish it was. Somehow, it would feel less frightening.
“Yes. I need space.”
He steps closer. I don’t recoil. “You want this to end.”
“No one said it was ending. I said I needed space. We went from dry fucking on your dad’s couch to… to whatever happened in Virginia.”
“I like what happened in Virginia.”
I swallow down my anger. He wants me to explode. I don’t want to give him that. “Yes, I imagine you did.” I glance past him, toward my house, but there’s nothing of it. Just darkness and limbs and leaves. I take a deep breath. Release it. “What happened with you, and Dominic, and Winslet?” In the dark, it’s easier to make demands of him, and this one has been playing inside my head over and over, since… the pool in Virginia. “I want to know. And I want to know now. I don’t want half-ass stories or your diversions. I want to know what the two of you did to her.” Eli is violent. I’ve witnessed it myself. It isn’t just the stories from Dominic, the rumors from Sebastian, the curiosities swapped among dealers.
I have his nail marks in my skin.
He has mine too, but no one around me has ever died.
“You shoved me, remember? You hit me.”
I knew he would say it. It doesn’t frustrate me any less. “That doesn’t answer the question.”
He laughs, a short, bitter sound. And just when I think I’m going to stalk off without answers, he says, “Dominic was fucking Winslet.”
My breath catches.
He is only a shadow in the dark, but with those words, said with a quiet eeriness, he is frightening.
“Yes, I’m sure you didn’t see that one coming, did you, because inside of your head, I’m always the bad person, right?” He doesn’t give me time to answer, but he isn’t wrong. It’s what I like about him. It’s what I fear about him. “It started with the three of us. We were all fucked up. But then… they kept doing it. And drunk again, out of my mind one year ago, I fucked them both one more time.”
“The night… she went missing.”
“The night she went missing.” He says the words with a certain smugness.
My heart leaps to my throat. “You said you didn’t.”
He doesn’t say a word.
“You lied.”
He smiles.
“You lie about everything, don’t you?”
His expression doesn’t change and I’m not even sure it’s anger I’m feeling now. Maybe it’s resignation. Of course he lied. Of course, of course, of course. He lies like he breathes. All the time. For no other reason but because he can.
“Was it…” My voice is hoarse. I think of Dominic. Of Eli warning me not to take drinks from him. “Did he force her?” But if he did, then Eli might have too. My stomach twists into knots.
Eli laughs. It’s wicked, and I don’t like it. “They were obsessed with each other. And she really, really liked to use me to get to him.” A moment’s silence. “Kind of like how he uses you, to get to me.”
My mouth is very dry. “Did you… have anything to do with her leaving? Do you know where she went?”
The quiet of the forest is almost overwhelming. So is the long, long gap between my question, and Eli’s answer. But finally, he gives me one. “I told you what I know.”
It’s a non-answer. I don’t think he murdered her. But what kind of weird shit did they do? Brother and sister and Eli? The way they were both on either side of me at the beach house, the way I felt like a pawn in a game they played with each other many times before…
I feel slightly nauseous. “Thank you for telling me.” I take a deep breath of cool air. “I’m going home. You should too.”
“I’m parked at your house.” It sounds like a reason. An answer. He says nothing at all about his confession.
Do I let this go like everything else about him? Why does he get so many passes from me? I know I’d forgive him anything, and by extension, his friends too. Okay, Dom, you fucked your sister. We all have secrets. I am disgusted with my own tolerance.
This is why we need breathing room. My moral compass has been slammed into the ground. It was already cracked, but now it is shattered.
“We’ll walk back together, because you’ve given us no choice, but we need space.” I start to sidestep him, but he moves with me, and we’re suddenly too close.
I can smell him. I can hear him breathe.
“Fuck your space.” His voice has the same low tone as always, but the words are tipped in poison. “I don’t want it.”
Despite where we are, how we are, a smile graces my lips. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? I do, but you don’t care what I want. You don’t respect what I want. You don’t respect anyone but yourself, and even that I’m not so sure about most days.”
“Yeah?” I know the next words will be cruel, the way he smiles through this one. He steps closer, and I have to tilt my head up higher, refusing to concede to him. “You think you have any fucking respect? You hit me.”
I hate the way he keeps saying it, driving it home, manipulating me. But it’s true, isn’t it? He isn’t inventing lies this time. He’s only using my own actions against me. Frustration mounts in my throat, and the words that tumble out of my mouth are tinged with it. “Why are you doing this? Why can’t you give me a… just give me a moment to breathe?”
“I gave you three days.” His words are cold. “No texts, no calls, I saw you at the gym, but I didn’t even go inside.”
My limbs feel shaky with those words. “No. That’s not how this works. You don’t get to say when it ends. I do. Go, Eli. Just go.” I step around him again, but this time, he grabs me by the wrist.
The flinch is a reflex. A startle response. A learned fear; my nervous system on high alert for my safety.
I face forward, and he faces the barn.
We’re side by side, but he’s not letting me go. His thumb presses over the veins at the base of my hand. Not hard, but firm.
“Your pulse is always so fast.”
I feel tension in my shoulders, in my neck, along my teeth, clenched together, waiting out his storm.
“What happens if you don’t take those pills?”
I close my eyes. “Nothing.”
He smooths his finger over the bones in my wrist. “Nothing?”
“I lose weight.”
“Oh, we don’t want that.”
