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Now he was trapped in the nightmare, and everything was backward, and it was the light he was afraid of, because now when the light came — any light at all — it brought the figures, and the voices, and the torture.

Was that what the breathing meant?

Were they nearby, and coming for him again?

He opened his mouth.

To call for help?

To beg for someone — anyone — to answer him?

But it made no difference, for no sound escaped his exhausted body.

The breathing came closer, and the sound of whispering voices swirled around him. His nerves began to tingle as he sensed the closeness of the tormentors, and he tried to make himself smaller, to shrink away from them.

A light — dazzlingly white — flashed on, and in the instant before the light blinded him as surely as the pitch blackness of a moment before, he saw the shapes.

The figures circled around him, edging closer.

Trembling hands ending in gnarled fingers reached toward him.

It’s a dream, he told himself. It’s only a dream, and I’ll wake up.

Wake up to the darkness?

He felt himself being lifted, raised from the hard bed on which he lay.

He was being carried now.

Carried to the torture room.

His mind cried out, but once again his exhausted body refused to obey the commands of his mind.

Now the figures were circled close around him, and the whispering voices grew louder and more excited.

For the first time, words emerged from the babble.

“Mine,” someone whispered. “I have a claim. It’s mine.”

The babble increased, and now the jagged nails were digging into his skin. He felt something press against his belly, something hard and sharp. Then he felt a slight popping sensation, and the pressure stopped, only to be replaced an instant later by something far worse.

A terrible pain, slashing upward from his belly, then downward. Almost as if—

He tried to push the thought away, but even as he tried to shut it out of his mind, the image came. It was as if he were hovering in the air, looking down at the carnage that was his own body:

His own body, slit open from his crotch to his throat.

Blood oozing from the gaping wound, trickling through his entrails.

His diaphragm, torn half away, twitching feebly as it tried to draw air into lungs that lay inert in the open cavity of his chest.

His heart, throbbing wildly, then slowing, its beating no longer rhythmic.

Stopping.

Stopping!

He was dying!

This time he was truly dying!

But it was only a dream! A nightmare from which he would awaken into—

The dark?

The terrible dark, where nothing, not even time itself, existed.

He could feel it now, feel the darkness gathering around him. The terrible image of his mutilated body was beginning to fade away, but from somewhere else — somewhere above him, a tiny point of light appeared.

A point that expanded and grew brighter, but was still far away.

He started toward the light, turning away from the terror and the darkness and the phantom figures.

He was running now, running as fast as he could, flying toward the light, a feeling of weightlessness buoying him, lifting him, raising him into the white brilliance.

The dream, the long nightmare from which there had seemed to be no escape was finally ending, and at last he was free.

Free to drift into eternity.

CHAPTER 9

I’m doing the right thing, Caroline told herself. I know I’m doing the right thing. But even with her own reassuring words echoing in her mind, a nagging doubt still buzzed around her like a gnat, so tiny she could barely see it, but its near invisibility frustrating her efforts to banish it. She gazed at her reflection in the mirror, knowing the image she saw should reassure her. The creases of worry that had been forming between her eyebrows only a few short months ago were gone, and even without a trace of makeup, she looked almost as young now as she had at her wedding to Brad.

Brad.

That was part of it, of course. Even though he’d died less than a year ago, there were already days when she didn’t even think of him. Not many, but a few. But that was natural, wasn’t it? She was getting married today, so it was natural that she’d be thinking much more about Tony Fleming than about Brad Evans.

Then why did she feel vaguely guilty — somehow disloyal — about what she was doing? But she knew the answer to that, too. Part of it was simply the unexpectedness of it all. Until she’d met Tony the whole idea of getting married again hadn’t occurred to her. Even dating hadn’t been on her agenda, with the pain of Brad’s death still so fresh. But from the moment his hand had touched hers in the elevator of The Rockwell, she’d known something was going to happen. Still, she’d been on her guard, knowing that even though he seemed interested in her, the relationship probably wasn’t going to go anywhere.

But it turned out he really did like children, and his eyes always seemed to be sparkling with good humor, and even on that first night, when she’d invited him to stay for a glass of wine after the kids had gone to bed, she’d found herself pouring out her troubles to him more easily than she would have thought possible. When he’d told her she was worrying too much, that things had a way of working themselves out, she hadn’t quite believed him. And when Irene Delamond called her the next day and asked her if she’d be willing to help redo the entire apartment she shared with her sister, Caroline had been certain that Tony must have had a hand in it. But it didn’t really matter how she’d gotten the job — the commissions on the pieces Irene picked out that very afternoon had been enough to bring the rent current and pay off all the old bills.

Suddenly her job had become secure, and it quickly became obvious that she had a flair for seeing what would work together and what wouldn’t. Irene had eventually even agreed to part with the hideous vase that she had insisted was “perfect” only a few weeks earlier.

A pattern had quickly developed — Tony had found her in the park the next Saturday, watching Ryan play baseball, and wound up spending the day with her. They hadn’t really done much — but it had just been comfortable having him around. A couple of weekends later, when she’d had to attend an auction to help Irene choose a few pieces for her apartment, he’d volunteered to keep an eye on Ryan while he played baseball in the morning and soccer in the afternoon, joining the other weekend fathers almost as if Ryan was his own son, even though Ryan himself objected to the whole arrangement.

“Why does he have to be there?” Ryan had demanded as they’d been finishing up dinner in the same Chinese restaurant they’d first gone to a few weeks earlier. “He’s not my dad!”