Kane stares up to the ceiling, drumming his fingers against his arm.
“My sweetheart.”
Mom, I wish you could see this.
“How long have you known her?” I ask.
“A very long time.”
“And wha—”
Kane lifts a hand to stop me. “I don’t like to talk about myself here. Certain details are used against me if overheard.”
I wilt in my seat. But this is my chance to get to know him. Hear all about who he was as a young man.
“I’d rather hear about you, anyway,” Kane finishes.
I gulp, feeling less heavy and more alert since he swapped out my IV bag. The smaller details of his face, hands, hair are clearing up. I can see my father now.
“What do you want to know?”There’s so much I want to tell you. Where would I even start?
“Do you have a sweetheart?” he asks.
The echoing loss of leaving Niklaus is an arrow impaling my chest that I can’t pull free. And without that pain? I’d have nothing left. The motivation I have right now to investigate, to understand the purpose behind my time-traveling journey, to discover how to control it? It would dissolve into thin air. I cling to that anguish like a beacon that will eventually guide me back to him.
“Yes.” My eyes water, and throat tightens up. “I have a sweetheart.”
“Let’s talk about him. Get my mind off this setting we’re in,” he says as though he is much older than I am. As though he is speaking to a child.
“I’ve known him my whole life,” I confess.
“And have you loved him all that time as well?” Kane asks.
My lips press flat. “Hated actually. He spent our childhood years tormenting me. I only just recently began…lovinghim.”
“That’s odd.”
“Why?”
“You hated him. He was cruel to you.”
“Yes.”
“I guess I’m going to need more context.” My father shrugs, like the love he knows is entirely too simple to be able to wrap his head around this one.
“When we were little, Mind Phantoms were used on him to think poorly of my family. Of me. He spoke poorly of my father, and that’s mainly why I hated him so much.”
“And how did your father handle that?”
My chest caves in. Everything inside my core crumbles.
“He wasn’t around to defend himself. He wasn’t there to stand up for me.” It all becomes so heavy, the unbearable reality that I’m sharing this with my father as a teenager who has no idea who I really am. I’ve wanted to tell him this for so long. “He died when my mother was pregnant with my brother and me. I used to dream he would protect me. That he’d never let anyone hurt me.”
Kane observes me try my hardest to hold it together.
“There were so many times I wanted to tell him all of the shitty things Nik had said to me. But now, that’s not at all what I want to tell my dad. I want to tell him that over the past few weeks I’ve been held captive with Nik. I’ve been assaulted and starved. I’ve been taken prisoner, and I’ve watched Nik take my punishments that have resulted in him losing his fingers and being showered in acid. And through all of that suffering, I’ve fallen in love with him.”
Kane lifts his chin. “I see.”
