Rouge (42 page)

Now, the Iceman stood on the
other side of the small freezer, his arms crossed and a crooked, gleeful smile
on his lips.
You screwed up,
he said. The voice echoed inside Joshua’s
mind.

Joshua ignored him, but he
knew he was right. He had screwed up big time. And the only way to fix his mess
was to bring them back.

Slowly, Joshua approached
the left steel table and reached out shakily, touching the tip of a frozen hand.
Joshua gazed down at Miss Smart, deep in a coma and frozen at sub-zero
temperatures. She was alive – he hoped – but there was a chance she’d have some
sort of brain damage if he woke her. She looked close to death when he went to
the hospital to kill her. Not only did her relief surprise him, but the look in
her eyes before he put her to sleep reminded him of Liz. He wouldn’t do it. He
couldn’t be that person. No matter what the Iceman said, he couldn’t kill her.

You’re weak,
said the Iceman.
You should have
ended it. Now you’ve got this to deal with when Hunter is out there, trapped,
the Agents closing in. They’ll take her away and you’re crying like a baby in
your little ice box.

He let out an exhausted,
exasperated sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. Something Liz once said to
him leapt from a memory inside his mind as though she were gazing into his eyes
and whispering to him.
Make the right choice now,
she said,
when it
counts.

Joshua nodded slowly, ran a hand
through his hair and made his decision. After all, there was really no other
choice in the matter.

Are you serious?
The Iceman shook his head slowly.
You’re
actually going to wake them up instead of finding Hunter first?

“Miss Smart will get Hunter
to forgive me,” Joshua said softly. “All will be as it was.”

The Iceman pointed a bright
blue finger at the other body.
And the kid?

Joshua lifted the silver
chain with the fragile symbol for fire made from his very own minerals and
dangled it before his eyes. He could still remember the moment Liz forced the
gift for her new baby daughter into his cold hands seconds before she died.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I’ll
have to wake Eli as well.”

Dear
reader,

For
you to understand exactly how blown away I am that you have picked up this book
and stuck with it to the end, let me share a little about myself and how this
story came to be.

As
I write this, I am sitting in my bed around a pile of books in a small city
called Adelaide. I work at my local video store, I teach acoustic guitar and I
am a part-time Nanny. I finished school two years ago, and have since then
worked several different jobs and travelled for 3 months around Europe. Having
caught the travel bug, I am now in the process of saving for 6 months work in a
Canadian ski resort in Alberta, after which I will travel the USA.

I
am not a movie star or someone with a particularly interesting or challenging
life story, but I just so happen to have a wild imagination gifted with the
ability to tell a story. And I am deeply proud of this book. So proud, in fact,
that the first several comments I received online from the lovely people who
read this as an ARC copy made me break down in tears. Because it is so
wonderful to have someone read something I have worked so hard on and love so
completely that it literally fills my heart with joy.

So
I want to personally thank you, Reader, for simply giving
Rouge
a chance, for sticking with it (her) until the end (of this
book), and I pray that you have fallen in love with Hunter’s story enough to
someday, when it is released, pick up the sequel.

With
all my love and gratitude,

Isabella