Read Online Return (Awakened Fate Book 3) by Skye Malone - Free Book Online Page A

hand around her side, grateful for the freedom to finally hold her and hoping to help her calm down at the same time. She flinched at the slight contact, and then a blush colored her cheeks as her startled expression faded to chagrin.
    “Sorry.”
    I made a dismissive noise.
    Her head leaned on my shoulder briefly as she put an arm around me.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    She shook her head.
    I watched her from the corner of my eye, uncertain if I should press her.
    “They’re crazy,” she said, almost as if answering something inside herself. “They’ve always been crazy.”
    I hesitated. “Okay.”
    “I mean, my whole life, it was ‘ocean water is diseased’, ‘rapists live on the beach’, all kinds of stuff like that. Even if they were trying to keep me from going in the water, that’s still an insane way to do it.”
    She paused, her brow furrowing. Looking up at me, she continued in a smaller voice. “You don’t think they thought I was dead or something, right?”
    I weighed responses and settled for the most neutral. And honest. “I don’t know.”
    “But Noah… he couldn’t have just…” She shook her head, anger filtering across her face, and she sped up, moving away from me. “They had to know I was fine. That I’d changed and left with you and all that. He had to have told them that, at least, so she must’ve just…”
    Chloe trailed off.
    “Maybe they were worried you wouldn’t come back,” I offered quietly.
    She stopped, looking back at me, and I couldn't hope to read her expression. “I…”
    Her brow furrowed. She turned away again.
    Tires rumbled behind us. A breath left her, the sound almost panicked. I glanced over my shoulder.
    A green sedan with darkened windows raced around the turn.
    “That them?” I asked.
    I looked back. Her face was answer enough. Not taking her eyes from the car, she came up beside me.
    The sedan veered to the side of the highway and then skidded to a stop in a cloud of gravel dust. A woman climbed out before the man at the wheel had even succeeded in shutting off the engine. Leaving the door open, she hurried across the gravel toward us, her red-rimmed eyes locked on Chloe with a look somewhere close to stifled terror. Behind her, the man got out too, moving awkwardly as if to keep from jostling the white sling holding one of his arms. As brown-haired and brown-eyed as his wife, he seemed only scarcely less worried, and he never took his gaze from his daughter while he closed the door.
    I tried to keep my face expressionless, but it was difficult. I’d said perhaps they were afraid Chloe wouldn’t come home.
    It looked more like they were afraid their daughter would fall dead where she stood.
    “Chloe,” the man called as he headed for us. “Are you alright?”
    “Yeah,” she answered, her voice choked. “Thanks for coming.”
    “H-how did you make it this far?” her mom asked, clenching her hands together as though to stop them from shaking. “And who did that to your neck? Are you–”
    The woman swallowed hard, her gaze darting from Chloe to me as she seemed to reconsider whatever she’d been about to say.
    Chloe hesitated. “I’m fine.”
    I glanced to her when she left the response at that.
    Her mother’s brow twitched down, the desire to press for more written all over her.
    “Who’s your friend?” her dad asked.
    Chloe drew a breath. “This is Zeke.”
    I tensed at the sudden alarm in their eyes.
    “The boy who…” Her dad looked between us. “But he…”
    “Is dehaian, yeah,” Chloe filled in. “Like me.”
    Their faces were a picture, though of confusion, shock or horror, it was hard to decide. In the time it took her to speak the words, they raced through the expressions, coming at last to a rabid sort of denial that varied only in its intensity.
    “Chloe, you are not –” her mother began.
    “Linda,” the man interrupted.
    With a choked noise, she turned to him.
    “Perhaps we should continue this