Gathering Dark by Candice Fox (best life changing books txt) 📕

beautiful nursery I’d made for him. I was standing at the kitchen window of my house, watching gold explosions dazzle on the horizon toward the coast, young revelers getting rid of their after-midnight fireworks. Dark landscape burning. I’d never been an enthusiastic New Year’s reveler, and, being unable to drink, I’d decided to spend the evening by myself watching Sex and the City reruns in my cotton pajamas instead.

It was on one of my frequent nighttime trips to the toilet that I’d stopped in the kitchen for a glass of milk. Almost as though its inhabitants could feel my exhausted presence, music started up at the Orlov house. I sighed, leaned, and looked at the house next door. Gold light in a tiled room. Kristi Zea storming in, thrusting open a cupboard that was immediately slammed shut by her boyfriend’s hand. His wide, boxy fist pulling back as if he’d drawn a bow, snapping forward, smacking into her temple with a noise I figured I could hear from where I was standing.

My mouth fell open. Next came the moment that changed everything. Not so much a decision, but an instinct to turn toward the stairs and run down them rather than heading back to my bedroom to grab my phone and call 9–1–1.

Stupid. Arrogant.

Later I knew what it was: sheer, ridiculous bravado. I was wild with instant adrenaline, with the belief that I was untouchable. That because I could somehow manage to create a thriving human life inside my body from nothing at all, that I was clearly some kind of god. I was a doctor. I created life. Sometimes I brought life back to the dead. Miracles. The week before the killing, I’d performed surgery on a five-year-old girl who had been paralyzed in a horrific pileup on the I-10. Her nerve endings had been as fine as hair. I’d saved her from a lifetime of paralysis. Intervening in a fight between a man and a woman at the house next door seemed like child’s play. I’d march in and know exactly what to do, just like I did in the operating room. I was heading down the driveway toward the Orlov house, shattering my own life one self-righteous step after the other.

Then a hand was on my mouth.

Weight on my back.

I was suddenly not in my old driveway in Brentwood eleven years ago but here, now, in my bedroom in my apartment in Crenshaw. The dream fell away like a dropped curtain and I felt stubble against my cheek, my ear. He didn’t say anything. In the nightmares shown on true crime television, they always say something. Don’t scream. Don’t move. Don’t panic. I bucked and felt his hips against my buttocks. An animal scream ripped loose from me, high and primal, full of shock and outrage.

I called Sneak’s name, though some cold corner of my mind told me that this man and I were alone in the apartment. I thought about the gun I’d refused from Ada, about the gun I’d once killed a man with, how easy it had been. My mind raced through a list of humans in proximity. The man with the guitar school whose name I didn’t know, probably snoring loudly in his bed only feet away. Celeste, the kid who had visited me that afternoon to play Pearl Jam at my door for treats, long gone hours ago. The men on the bikes. Was he one of them? All of this mental chaos crashed into my mind in mere seconds as he found my arm and dragged it behind me.

Once he has you tied up, I thought, that’ll be—

I didn’t need to finish the thought. I snapped my head backward, hopeful but off with my aim, glancing him on the jaw. It was enough to startle him, to loosen the hand on my mouth, which was pressed so tight against my lips it was crushing them against my teeth, making them bleed. I caught a minuscule roll of calloused skin between my teeth and bit down hard. A yowl. He mashed my head into the pillows. He was turning me, trying to roll me over, maybe to punch me, subdue me. My arms were free. I punched and kicked, wailing with effort and terror, the man easing back in the darkness just enough for me to slither off the bed.

He went for my hair. In prison, that’s the first and easiest mistake a fighter can make. A big wad of an opponent’s hair makes a good handle to control their head, but you leave their arms and legs loose, the primary weapons. With enough adrenaline pumping, a fighter can lose a chunk of hair and not even feel it tearing away. I struck out with a punch in the darkness, caught thigh, denim. My knee hit a boot on the carpet. I aimed again and hit pay dirt. The man folded in two above me, slammed into my bedside table, all the wind leaving him as my fist sank into his balls. His hands released my hair, flying away to cover his tender parts. I scrambled out from beneath him, grabbed what I could on my way to the door and hurled it back in his direction. My work bag. A laundry basket. A shoe. In the hall I was hit with a wave of nausea, dizziness, my brain failing to keep up with my fighting, fleeing body. He was there. He caught my ankle as I steadied myself in the doorway to the kitchen. I hit the floor with a whump.

JESSICA

“What kind of experience are you seeking tonight, Jessica?” he asked.

Jessica stretched, suppressed a shiver as his hands worked into her hair, tugged the tie away gently as he always did, began to smooth and knead the taut muscles at the base of her skull. Goren had taken another last-minute appointment. He didn’t seem perturbed, but Jessica knew she was pushing her luck. Still reeling from the Harbour woman’s