“Say something, Alice,” he begs, pain lancing his words. “I’m sorry. Sorrier than I can ever say. I need to know you’re going to be okay. Please, Alice.”

I snap up my head. “Stop calling me that. She doesn’t exist anymore. Not after what I’ve done. Not after I killed Hope, over and over and over.” My voice breaks and then shatters. “I don’t deserve that name. Not now. Never again.”

He takes a shuddering breath. “What should I call you, then?”

There’s only one answer. Only one name that fits. Only one word I merit.

“Malice,” I say. “You can call me Malice.”

Chapter 49

Chapter 49

I open my eyes. The exposed beams of the soaring living room ceiling stare down at me, and the leather sofa cradles my spine. Sunlight dapples over the lower half of my body, and a lemony-citrus scent tingles my nose.

I’m back in my seventeen-year-old body. Back where I have complete control over my limbs, where I’m the actor, not the observer, in my life.

Testing, I wiggle my toes. Swallow. Flex my fingers. Just as my older self did ten years in the future.

In an instant, the next events of Malice’s life rush through my mind.

Panicking and desperate, Bandit hatches a plan so wild that it might actually work: kill his younger self so that he and Alice never fall in love. Never disappoint Archie. They’ll break the chain of abandonments that Archie suffers, take away that final hurt that sends him over the edge.

They may have failed in the previous attempts to separate the two. But they would succeed if one of them was dead.

With only three trips left, however, they have to be strategic. They have to return to a time where they’ve already laid the groundwork. They have to trick young Alice, so that it appears like Bandit was the target all along. And they have to accomplish all of the above without giving their younger selves a chance to fall in love.

Shouldn’t be a problem, Bandit said. In high school, he was arrogance personified. She was closed off to dating. And then he said something that Malice would never, ever forget: “Sometimes even soul mates won’t fit together if they meet at the wrong age.”

They proceeded to execute their plan.

Only, I’m not there to experience it because I’m back in the present.

I zoom around my brain, searching in those little nooks, in the shadowed corners where a traveling being might hide. I even check for a consciousness crouching stealthily under mine.

There’s no doubt about it. She’s no longer with me—the woman named Malice who tried to trick me. The mother who inadvertently killed her child, over and over again. The version of my older self who said goodbye to the man she loved across time streams.