One hundred and sixty-nine

Talia's POV:

I'm not sure how I got to the bedroom, but I found myself there, curled up in a ball of silent agony on the bed that Nicholas and I shared.

Every sound seemed distant to me. I couldn't feel or understand what anyone was saying, yet, I knew that I wasn't the only one in that room.

My heart was ripped into two and this must be how Nicholas felt when they took me from him, and this was the second gruesome time I was thinking that he was dead. But I couldn't accept reality. It was too raw, too deep to allow the comfort of tears.

  I thought I knew what it was like to feel loss, to know that I would never see his smile again or feel the warmth of his embrace. It was only now that I realized that there were degrees of agony. That pain could range from devastating to soul-shattering.

When I lost Nicholas before, he had been the center of my world. Now, however, he was my entire world, and I didn't know how to exist without him.