Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
No. No, there are too many blooming spots. Too many…holes in her dress.
“Stabbed.” It came out a soundless whisper.
The woman I adored beyond all reason or rational thought had been brutally stabbed.
Something crashed inside the house, spouts of flame jetting out from the back toward the lake. Turquoise shifted to orange, the lake a mirror aflame. Then the entire house seemed to pulse, the fire suddenly oddly quiet.
Primitive instinct took over. Scooping Diya into my arms, I said, “Run!”
Flames at my back, the world silent, and then…a massive boom of sound as the house let out its breath and exploded in all directions.
Chapter 2
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Dec 2
Time: 20:37
Arrived at site of single-vehicle crash on Knox Canyon Road. One fatality: Virna Musgrave (68). Not suspicious at first glance, but the local out walking his dog who discovered the crash—James Whitby (46)—states that Ms. Musgrave drove this route monthly for years without any issues, and that she never exceeded the speed limit.
“If anything,” he stated, “she sat at least ten below. Used to annoy the shit out of her neighbors—me included—if we ever got stuck behind her, but she always said we’d thank her one day for teaching us patience.
“She wouldn’t have lost control. Especially not on a clear evening like today—it would’ve still been light out when she went over. I ran down to check on her when I spotted the car, and the hood was dead cold. She’d been there for a while.”
He also noted that despite her annoying driving habits, she was a “nice lady” and well-liked by her few neighbors. The Musgrave residence is the biggest property on the road, right at the top.
There were no skid marks, and she appears to have gone over the edge at high speed while going downhill. Seat belt on and her car’s a newer-model Jeep that held up well to the crash, so she might have survived if not for the steep nature of the drop—it looks like she took a serious bang to the head and I don’t like the way her neck’s sitting.
It’s possible she suffered a medical event that caused her to go off the road. Have to wait for the ME’s report on that. Vehicle to be towed to LAPD forensic facility for further investigation after the techs finish up here.
Case open for now.
Chapter 3
In that endless moment when my feet left the earth, Diya’s bloody body clutched to my chest, I saw her as I had that very first time: a butterfly beauty of a woman who laughed with open delight under the colored bulbs strung across the roof of a West Hollywood tequila bar that buzzed with people and conversation.
Her dress had been short and a glittering green so dark it was almost obsidian, her hair tumbled black curls that fell to just past her shoulders, and her presence so bright that she glowed. I hadn’t known her name then, hadn’t understood that her parents had seen that glow, too, right from the moment she’d first come into the world.
Diya. A light against the dark.
Only later had I begun to understand that her candle flame was one with an internal flicker, ever in danger of going out. Sometimes, there was an insubstantial quality to my wife that panicked me—as if she were a will-o’-the-wisp that might slip out of my grasp one moonless night.
I couldn’t lose her. Not as I’d lost the others.
I’d woken with my heart thudding night after night during our first weeks together, needing to see her beside me. Her chest rising and falling. The feel of her skin a relief because it meant she was real and not a figment of my need for her. This woman who was as fragile as a dandelion against a storm wind…and who burned incandescent.
To not go to her the night I’d first heard her laugh had been an impossibility. She’d seen me weaving my way through the crowd, watched me with those enigmatic eyes she’d made up smoky and smudged that night.
Every step I took had been a step closer to my destiny. Every tiny hair on my body had prickled, my charmer’s mouth suddenly dry, and my words jumbled up in my head.
She’d known. So had I.
Strangers to each other or not, this was it. We were it.
But when I’d asked her for her number, she’d told me I better have a good memory before reeling off a long cell number with an unusual country code.
Then her friends had decided to change bars and she’d left me with a smile that was a teasing challenge, the quiet enigma of her morphing into sweet, playful beauty. “Call me tomorrow…if you remember the number.”
We’d run laughing out of a Las Vegas wedding chapel five weeks later.
* * *
—
I, Tavish Advani, promise you, Diya Prasad, that I will protect the candle flame of you against any and all storms that may come. Nothing and no one will ever get between us. You will ever be my guiding light, the warmth that shows me the way home for the rest of my life.