“Among other things, you’re back there in your head, aren’t you? Trying to process loss behind bars.”
My Adam’s apple shifts.
He might be the only man on earth who can understand what I’m going through right now.
“You don’t know how to talk about it. I understand that. I knew how to escape the asylum, but I couldn’t leave my Skylenna. You’re the prisoner who made multiple escape attempts but kept coming back, aren’t you?”
His words summon that memory of tasting freedom, then rejecting it to go back to my cage.
“It must have been. You grew up with the blueprints of that prison. You excelled in Vexamen and Dementia’s history. Of course, you knew how to escape. But why did you always come back?” he asks, though the tone in his voice suggests he already knows the answer to that.
I sigh. “If there was any chance Sapphire would return to me, then I needed to remain a prisoner.”
Dessin continues to watch me knowingly.
“I remember reading that it was reported that prisoner was the greatest swordsmen the Mazonist Brothers had ever seen. They used him in fighting rings for ten long years. And no one saw where he was locked up.”
Hearing this historical figure dissect my role in history is not something I’d ever picture would happen to me. I have both memories. The one life of him being in a coma. The other of him hating me when I started to court his daughter.
And there was no possibility of him ever looking at me like this in either life.
“Ten years, Niklaus.”
The backs of my eyes sting. So, I continue training my stare on the water.
“And I also read that the prisoner took his wife’s punishment. That he lost a finger for her.”
“I lost three,” I admit. And with a quick glance, I say, “Someone very kind saved two of them.”
Dessin narrows his stern eyes at me. “You did that for my daughter?”
Before I can answer, he keeps going…
“In that fighting ring, the infamous prisoner was pitted against his wife and refused to hurt her. He even covered her body with his own when all inmates were punished and hosed down with an acid invented by Crow Ivast. Did you do this for my daughter?!” he asks again, pushing off the tree.
I wave him off. “Don’t give me an ounce of praise. Please. Christ, I don’t fucking deserve that.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because!” I explode. Not many people yell at the man standing in front of me, but I guess I’ve lost all access to my sanity. “You know how I’ve treated her half our lives. In both of them. I was…fucked in the head after they took me. I—took it out on her. So yes, I did those things for your daughter. Of course, I did! I fucking love her. I am in love with her. But I don’t deserve her. I had to do horrible shit in that prison. I almost committed suicide so many times. I don’t fucking deserve that wonderful, brilliant, beautiful girl.” I point to the house with glowing windows and twinkling porch sconces.
My eyes are throbbing from not allowing myself to release these pent-up sentiments unwinding at the seams.
“I was so arrogant growing up learning about what you and your wife, my parents, all of them went through. The asylum, the prison, the whole fucking city! I read it all on paper. I didn’t get it! I didn’t fucking get it. But now that I’ve lived through it—now that I’ve seen and felt what my own dad went through…it makes mehatemyself. How fucking disrespectful was I? How fucking incompetent and deranged to make light of these disgusting moments in history you all had to endure?!” I clasp my hands on the back of my neck. “So no. No, it doesn’t matter that I did those things for your daughter. Because I couldn’t even save him…I let—him—die!”
Sapphire’s father crashes into me with a fatherly embrace that pushes me into a full-blown breakdown. I cry like a fucking child into his shoulder, wrinkling his suit coat into my hands and pretending I’m hugging my dad. One last time.
“I was there too, Niklaus. I couldn’t save him either. And in time, we will both forgive ourselves. You hear me? Because you know what your dad is thinking right now? He’s thinking, there is nothing to forgive. You are his only son, and he loves you.”
We sit outside talking for hours until I calm down. He tells me about the time my dad cut through his own palms to rip off barbed wire from around Dessin’s ankle in a prison Fun House Night. He laughed about a few of the terrible jokes my dad shared with the group at his expense. I got it all off my chest too. My days in the prison. Meeting Meridei in the asylum. Absinthe and Albatross.
Eventually, Kane comes to the front to share his own experiences too.
“I wanted to tell you about what happened to my fingers in the prison,” I tell him.
Kane examines the two crooked ones and the ring finger that’s missing.
“I wanted to tell you about the woman who reattached these two for me.”
