“Yeah, in the 1940s.”
“Penelope.”
A lump sits in my chest, not quite my throat, but it chokes me all the same.
I’ve spent my life thinking of Billy. Of what we could have had. I dreamed of the family we could build. I didn’t think we’d ever get it. Be together. Find one another again. Something all our own.
Ours.
Not theirs.
I don’t trust anyone here.
“I don’t want to have children.” I see his bright eyes lift to mine, the blue like ice, but deeper, glacial, too much hiding beneath the surface. “For a cult.”
“Penelope,” he warns, smiling this smile that isn’t really a smile at all.
I smile back, my chin dipped, eyes lifted, lashes fluttering as I feel a dimple divot my cheek, my lips closed, no teeth showing as we both just keep smiling at each other. So many words not being said but felt instead.
I the lamb, he the wolf.
Leaning forward where we sit opposite one another. Billy drops his elbows from the arms of the high-back, antique wooden chair, carved with ravens and woodland, that we both sit in, to his knees.
“Don’t keep flinging that word around, Little Lamb.” He bends in closer, our faces almost touching. “Everything here has ears.” His lips brush the shell of my ear, his hands smoothing up the arms of my chair, his fingertips just brushing my ribs. “And all of them are listening.”
His lips come to my cheek, and he kisses me chastely, his plump lips soft, breath warm where it glides down the side of my neck. The tip of his nose is beside my ear and he inhales deeply, his hands still on the arms of my chair, all the way at the back of them where I’m pinning myself to the back of my seat, my spine digging into the dark mahogany.
“Blasphemy is punishable by so. Many. Things,” I repeat his words back to him, something he told me when we first arrived here, my words not much more than a whisper.
Billy draws back just enough to see me, our faces angled just the right way for us to fall into a deep kiss, but neither one of us moves, isgoingto move.
“All of this is so new,” I inhale as I say it, Billy nodding slowly in agreement.
But Billy is not.
I look into his eyes, silently sighing, my breath leaving me in a rushed huff.
He’s my everything.
My forever.
But I never thought it would be so forced.
“I want you to be happy here.” It feels almost like a confession, the way Billy breathes the words out, exhaustion trying to hide behind them. “I wantyou,” he says then, so serious, so flat, so unfeeling, but with an intensity that could start wars, break peace, and set the entire world aflame. “I want you, Nells. I want you to want to be here. I want you to like it. I want you to find your home here.” He swallows, breathing in so deep I feel his chest touching mine. “I want you to wantme.”
“I do want you,” I reply quickly, my hands finding his cheeks, my eyes hard on his. “I just-”
“I know,” Billy cuts me off, straightens up, pushing back into his own chair, and I feel so startled by his sudden distance that I have to grab the arms of my chair to stop myself flopping out of it. “And it doesn’t matter anyway,” he says coldly, his eyes shooting everywhere but to me. “We have to do it whether you like it or not.”
Chapter 12
PENELOPE
His bright green eyes are what nightmares are made of.
The way there's a smile in them that isn’t on his mouth. His white skin pale like the surface of the moon, it matches his short hair, so pale blonde it looks like snow. And with his crisp white lab coat, worn over a pale blue button-up shirt tucked into straight black suit trousers, he just looks too clean.
I don’t trust anyone here.
