Tear You Apart by Sarah Cross Read Free Book Online

villain, destined to be slain by a hero, but there was no telling when that would happen. It did explain, though, why Freddie was so gung ho about decapitating the guy.
    “He’d get frustrated sometimes. Mad at me,” Mira said. “But usually he was really nice. Accommodating. Like, the way he’d treat a VIP guest, except … you know. And then, when I went into that room—triggered the murder part of the curse—he … was so angry. Like it was all my fault. Because if I hadn’t opened that door, he could have gone on pretending. I never would have known who he really was or what he’d done. At that point, I wasn’t Mira to him, I was just another girl who prevented him from being happy.”
    Viv had never really talked to Mira about that day. She felt a little guilty for bringing it up, but it was too late to take it back.
    “And he … changed. His whole demeanor. He was very—hard? Like, resolved. He was going to kill me, and there was no talking him out of it. You could see it. Like he’d turned a key, and locked us both into that fate.”
    Mira glanced up, her fingers poised on the heart charm on her bracelet. “Did something happen? Did Henley—do you really think he’ll do it?”
    “I don’t know.” Viv told her what had happened at Seven Oaks. “Sometimes I just want it to be over. Sometimes—I feel like the waiting is the worst part. But I’m not looking forward to the ending.”
    “I could talk to him. See if he’ll …”
    “Confess? That’s not going to happen. He might not even believe he’ll do it. That doesn’t mean he won’t.”
    Viv’s gaze drifted to Mira’s bookshelves. They were packed with skinny playbooks, novels, DVD cases. Old movies like
Casablanca
and
Now, Voyager
. “I used to watch movies with Regina when I was little. We’d make popcorn and curl up on the couch. It was one of my favorite things we did together because it was just us, and she’d always find a movie I liked. Have you ever seen
The Yearling
?”
    “Maybe, a long time ago,” Mira said. “It’s about a deer, right?”
    “Yeah. This boy adopts a young deer. Brings it home, befriends it, takes care of it. It’s a really cute movie, at first. The boy even lets the deer sleep in his bed. And there’s this scene where the deer sticks his whole head into a pail of milk. Really adorable animal antics. Which I loved. But then the deer gets older and starts causing trouble on the family farm. Destroying crops, messing with their livelihood. They can’t control him.So, one day the dad orders the boy to take the deer into the woods and shoot it.
    “I cried so hard. I don’t know if I’d ever sobbed like that at a movie. And Regina was stroking my hair, and I was wiping my face on her shirt … and then she told me that when a wild thing makes trouble, you have to turn it loose. You have to kill it so it never comes back. She told me I was like the little deer. She said,
One day I’ll send you into the forest, and send a man after you to make sure you don’t come back
. She told me I should like the movie. It was my story.”
    “God, Viv …”
    “Before that, I had no idea she felt that way. I thought she loved me as much as she always had. As much as she’d pretended to? I don’t know. And even after she said that, I didn’t know what to think. The two of us were a family. My dad was so shitty to her after the first year of their marriage—he was such a bastard, a bad father and a worse husband, leaving her to be my only parent, basically. I didn’t really mind that he was almost never home—I was glad, because I had Regina all to myself.
    “I used to tell the mirror to shut up when it was mean to her. It was like a game to me back then. I didn’t understand why it would hurt her, just like I didn’t understand why she’d get so upset when my dad didn’t come home. I told her—I remember once, I had gone to her room to try to make her feel better. She was lying in the dark, her