Being in the Witness Protection Program is hard enough, even without the sense that your memories aren’t all your own. And when Jin Amaris narrowly avoids death—the third time is, apparently, the charm—she is handed the keys to the mystery of who she was…or is. The real question is whether she’ll unravel that mystery before death catches up with her again.
The Halo of Amaris © 2018 by Jade Brieanne
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or events, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover Art © by Ashley Wike
Edited by Nancy Canu
Copy edited by Les Tucker
ISBN10: 1514895889
ISBN13: 978-0-15148-9588-7 [1][2]
Second Edition * August 2018
[3]www.iamjadebrieanne.com
To God, who without, this and I would be nothing. To my family, who are the indestructible support beams in my life. To my readers on Tumblr and Livejournal, your words are my very inspiration. To Denny Jo for ALWAYS having an answer for me. To my friends, my Aggies, to those who have ever encouraged me. To 5 men who planted this seed from so very far away...
Thank you.
“I believe you can change a life with just one word.”
- Onew
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
About the Author
Chapter One
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.
Jin Amaris turned over in her sleep, huffing as she pulled a duvet over her head to block out the sound.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.
It didn’t work. She twisted under the covers, shifting until she was facing the side of the bed her boyfriend slept on. “Aiden,” she groaned. “Turn that off.”
No answer.
The ticking grew louder, infuriatingly so in the silence, almost like it was inside her head. Why was it so damn loud?
Irritated, she threw the covers back and sat up, trying to blink the sleep out of her eyes. The room was dim but not dark. Instinctively, she felt the bed for Aiden. He wasn’t there.
“Honey?” she called softly. Still nothing.
Squinting, she turned her head slowly, looking around the room. Bright moonlight crept past the thin sheer curtains and cast everything in a pale, white light. A beam, maybe headlights, angled across the wall in a slow arc, giving her a brief glimpse of her surroundings.
My old apartment. I haven’t been here in…years.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.
She looked down fingered the pocket watch hanging from her neck. That’s why it sounded so loud.
A breeze flew in through the open window, rustling a few pages of the diary on top of her vanity, and she looked up. Right above the vanity was a poster of five men wearing brightly colored, patterned suits. A boy band.
Okay, five years, actually, she mused.
“Oh, will you get it the hell together, already?” a voice boomed, echoing off the walls.
Jin yelped and swung her head toward her old futon, the first real piece of furniture she'd bought, back when she was eating convenience-store noodles and snack cakes to survive. Just above the futon, on the wall by the window, was a large painting of Amina, the Queen of Zazzau, and for a moment Jin thought the image was actually speaking to her until she made out a woman’s silhouette in front of the canvas. The woman was parked on the wooden frame of Jin’s futon—her shoulders held back and her head held high.
A strum of superiority radiated from the silhouette, like a queen sitting on her throne and Jin felt moved…until she saw the booted feet perched on her throw pillows. The light in the room shifted and Jin was able to give her a long, withering glare—taking in the belted tunic with its blazing embroidery of a phoenix, the leather vest, and the rough-spun linen pants—but frowned when she got to the head. She couldn’t see the face.
“It’s about damn time you woke up! I’ve been sitting here forever! I’ve got things to do, too, you know. Lots of things!”
Jin was tempted to roll her eyes. The woman’s voice was terse, and it was impatient, but it made sense. Only a person who’d broken into your home would react so crudely. The only reaction that didn’t make sense was Jin’s. She was annoyed, yes, but she wasn’t afraid. Familiarity, recognition, a touch of ambiguity, yes, but not fear.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.
Jin tilted her head toward the figure. “Why are you here? Wait. Better question. Why am I here—in this room?”
“That is a good question.” The woman shrugged. “Too bad I don’t know the answer.”
“Don’t play dumb. You didn’t just poof up in here like a puff of smoke. You have to know.”
“Poof up in here like a puff of smoke?” the woman parroted, indignant anger vibrating in her voice. “You’re damn right I don’t ‘go poof.’ I walked in like any normal hu—” She cleared her throat. “—person would.” The woman kicked a throw pillow as she stood up on the futon. Jin exhaled nosily as she watched her pillows go flying.
“Give it a rest. Your pillows will live. There are more important things here, and if someone—I won’t say any names, Jin—” she said pointedly, “could have woken up just a little earlier, we would have had this over and done with, but nooooo! Someone wants to sleep all day!”<
br />
Jin ignored the woman’s rant in lieu of taking a closer look at her. She squinted, tried to angle her head, tilt closer, but still nothing. Just muted highlights of her face, eclipsed by shadows.
The shadows didn’t scare Jin, but then again, not a lot did, although she considered that trait her biggest flaw. Little girls were supposed to be scared of the dark—they quiver and shake and run for their mother’s skirts when the dark comes. That was a crock of shit. The best secrets were shared in the dark, and the dark was loyal. It hides your secrets and holds them. Little girls know that. So it wasn’t like she was afraid. It was just the idea of the shadows keeping the woman’s face hidden bothered her—that the last place this woman’s face belonged was behind a veil.
Jin reached back behind her, her fingers inching toward her lamp. She wanted to turn the switch, fill the room with light, see if the shadows slunk to the floor and back into the corner. But her hand hit empty air and she remembered the lamp wasn’t there. It was in Manhattan, sitting on the nightstand by her bed.
She wasn’t in Manhattan. She was in Seoul.
The shadow woman walked to the foot of the bed, and the sound of bottles clanking against each other before falling over made her jump back. Groaning, she bent over and picked one up, glaring at it.
“You’ve been drinking again?” the woman scolded. “You said that you were done.”
The word “again” echoed in Jin’s head and she looked away.
When Jin didn’t answer, the woman made a sound of disgust in the back of her throat before she flung the green bottle up against the wall. It shattered into large shards that floated in the air. Suspended, they began to spin, rotating faster and faster. Swooshswooshswoosh. The shards ground to a stop, shifted, and flew back toward each other, rearranging until they had pieced the bottle back together. The green glass thunked against the carpet as it hit the floor.
“Great. Just great.” The woman frowned, grazing the bottle with a hot glare. “When I say break, you break, you piece of sh—”
“This is a dream, isn’t it?”
The woman spun to face Jin. “Whoa!” she cried, holding her hand to her chest in mock astonishment. “Well, I don’t have to teach you anything, now do I? You’re brilliant! Practically a genius!” Her hands clapped against her hips. “Of course it’s a dream, nitwit.”
“Is it absolutely necessary for you to talk to me like that?”
“Yes,” she said, grinning. “It’s how I show my affection.”
“Aria,” Jin said as she pinched the bridge of her nose. Jin blinked. Aria—the name tumbled from her lips so easily.
The shadow woman laughed, spun on her toes, and sat down on the edge of Jin’s bed with a huff. “You know, it always amazes me how you can remember something as ineffectual as my name but can’t remember the fact that you’ve di–”
An upset voice came from the other side of Jin’s door. “Aria!”
“Oh, fuck me, are you serious?” the woman cried into the darkness. “I wasn’t going to tell her anything! You know, you people come up with the dumbest rules. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t tell the stupid chit she’s going to get kill—”
“Aria!” came more voices, all exasperated.
She threw her hands up in disgust. “I wasn’t going to say anything!”
“Open the door, Aria,” said a deep voice, full of patience.
“Seff is right. Let Ahn do the talking,” came another voice, lighter but decidedly male.
“Ahn?” A snort. “Don’t be silly, Parker. Leader or not, this requires common sense.” That voice was feminine. Skeptical and feminine.
Aria groaned as if this was the most arduous thing she’d ever dealt with. She stood and all but stomped to the bedroom door. “If I have to deal with any of you, then let it be that old fogey. The rest of you get lost.”
“Aria, be reasonable.”
“I am being reasonable. Send Ahn.”
The voices rose again in unison, a cacophony of insults and praises, debate slamming against solutions, angry tirades and soothing mollification. The moment Aria’s hand wrapped around the door handle, it was silent. As the door swung open, another figure walked in, shrouded in the same darkness as Aria.
“Hello, cousin.” His voice was warm and light as he spoke. He bent forward and briefly touched his forehead to hers. “You look lovely as always, even in death.”
“Save the flattery. Are they gone?”
“They are.”
“I wonder what you would have done if they’d sent someone else. Someone a little more responsible. Sane, maybe.”
“Lunacy runs in this family, dear cousin, so I would think you would want to empty your pockets of rocks when we are welcomed in a glass house.”
“Whatever,” Aria said. She looked toward the door again. “They are going to kill you when they find out.”
“Shhh. They won’t find out until it’s too late. It will be okay.”
“Let’s hope so.”
They both turned toward Jin like they just remembered she was in the room. A pendant now pulsed dimly with tawny light around Aria’s neck, illuminating brown skin and long, thick dreadlocks.
The male figure walked to the window and the light didn’t touch his face. He pulled back the curtain and looked down to the streets below. Jin’s old bedroom was in a high-rise, luxury apartment in Jung-gu. She’d been drawn here because of her dad’s stories of how he’d met her mother there. The military, oh so romantic. The N Seoul Tower was just visible through the craggy outlines of the other buildings, and there was a tree in Cheonggyecheon that had J & S carved into it. All of it was beautiful. All of it haunted her.
“Seoul is very beautiful. This was the last place you felt safe, wasn’t it? Before Aiden. Before Shen.”
Jin’s brows pinched. “You know about that?”
“I know more than that. You’re twenty-seven,” he began. “You work as a Brand Manager—it’s how you met your best friend, Chaerin Williams. Your boyfriend is a Special Agent with the FBI. You were in witness protection for a year before sending your ex-fiancé to jail. You haven’t been back here, to Seoul, since.”
Jin could suddenly hear her own heart. “How do you know that?” she whispered.
“I know everything—well, mostly everything, and that’s only a technicality seeing as we haven’t officially met—”
“What are you saying? You’re standing right here. Of course we’ve met.”
“—because I want to keep you safe.” He pressed on. “We both do.” He looked over his shoulder. “By the way, your clock stopped ticking.”
Jin looked down. The watch was silent. She didn’t feel the infinitesimal thump in the palm of her hand.
“Open it. The time should read eleven forty-two.”
It took her a long moment to comply, her stare heavy on the two figures in her old room. Eventually her gaze dropped to her palm. Opening it, she angled the now-silent watch toward the light from the window. “Eleven forty-two...”
“Like clockwork,” he said with a chuckle.
Jin didn’t smile.
“I know you are confused, but trust me, if I could give you more than that, I would. But rules are rules.” The man shrugged.
Jin sighed noisily. “If I asked nicely, would you try and make some sense?”
“Sorry, no can do.” The man pulled the curtains closed and spun to face Jin. “Oh, and Aria? If you could hold her down please, I would appreciate it.”
“You’ve got it.”
Jin’s body stiffened. The pocket watch fell from her hand. “Hold me down? For what?”
Aria moved like lightning, and before Jin could do more than blink, the shadow woman straddled Jin’s waist and had both Jin’s wrists stretched painfully above her head.
It was weird, considering her current circumstances, but Jin noticed Aria’s smell. Like the earth after the rain. The fragrance was overpowering, and on impulse, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
Memories she couldn’t quite catch fluttered right under her lids, and she would have reached out to grab them if she could. Aria pitched forward until her face was only inches away from Jin’s. The smell intensified, and Jin’s blood quickened.
She looks just like…
How is that possible? What is going on?
Aria smiled, although it was broken and tinged with something Jin couldn’t place. “I’m sorry. This was the only thing I could think to do without breaking the rules, cub. If there was another way…”
“Another way for what?” Jin tried to pull her wrist free but Aria was too strong. “Get off of me!”
“Afraid I can’t do that.”
Jin bucked hard under Aria, trying to the throw her off, but Aria didn’t budge. She heard the faint sound of metal clearing a sheath and a terror she didn’t understand awoke deep down in her soul. “You don’t have to do this,” she breathed, trembling. “You don’t.”
“No, you’re wrong. I do. Have courage, young lion. It’ll be over soon.”
Aria was wrong. It happened slowly, as if Jin wasn’t there, as if she were watching it in playback or she’d read about it somewhere and her mind was animating it for her. Jin couldn’t breathe. Her heart was racing. Her head was spinning.
A black blade pierced Aria’s chest as a sword drove through her, and Jin screamed. She watched, horrified, as Aria’s face screwed up in pain. Still, her grip never loosened.
Aria’s eyes snapped open and locked with Jin’s. “You’re running out of time,” she whispered.
Another scream ripped through Jin as the blade impaled her chest.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock...
“Wake up!”
Chapter Two
Jin’s eyes flew open and she just barely fought off the scream clawing at her throat. She looked around, desperate, eyes wide with fear. She then remembered where she was.
She was not in her old apartment. She was not in Seoul. She was on the subway in Manhattan. Her hand rose to her chest, and she breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t feel a blade protruding from it. She was safe.
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