Chapter 57

“Jory, please.” Bruce’s voice cracks with tears. “Peter is dead.”

“No!” Jory covers his ears with his hands and shakes his head as if he can shake those damning words away. Pain explodes within him, nausea making him weak, a million shards of broken glass twisting into his skull. “Stop it, Bruce! God, don’t say that. Don’t even thinkthat!”

Taking Jory’s wrists, skin cold against Jory’s, Bruce eases Jory’s hands from his ears and says, “Listen to me. Listen—”

“No,” Jory says again, twisting away.

When Bruce starts to speak, Jory pulls out of his grasp. He opens the door and stumbles blindly from the car, doubled over against the pain eating away at him inside.

“I just talked to him this morning,” he chokes, the words lost in the snow and the wind. He remembers Peter’s arms around him, tender kisses, the warm body pressed tight against Jory’s own. “He told me he loved me. He told me—”

“He’s dead,” Bruce says again, getting out of the car.