Tate, whom she’d watched clean the grout between the kitchen tiles on his hands and knees with a toothbrush. The living room appeared to be untouched, exactly the same as she’d left it, save for a long, bloody footprint.
Silva continued down the hallway, following the blood, pausing before the open bathroom door.
The light was on. Blood-spotted gauze pads, dropped on the floor beside the sink, the water left at a trickle. An open bottle of antiseptic cleanser. Wrappers for bandages, torn open and dropped behind the spigot. There was nothing in the world that could have possibly illustrated distress as sufficiently as Tate leaving his bathroom in disarray.
She tiptoed down the rest of the hallway, pausing outside the closed bedroom door. The door seemed to move in slow motion when she pushed it, creaking miserably. He was there on the bed, sitting at a forty-five degree angle, supported by the two bed pillows and those fluffy towels from the bathroom, staring vacantly.
“Tate?”
If she had feared he was catatonic, it was quickly dispelled when his eyes flicked to her.
He was a mess. He was covered in bruises, dark green and a sickly yellow, nearly black in spots. His straight nose was straight no longer, and while the bandage had been removed from his eye, the gash on his face it had covered . . . should probably have still been covered, she thought. His topknot was a bird’s nest, sliding sideways off his head as he pressed against the pillow. A look of pain crossed his face, although whether or not that was from the sight of her or actual physical pain, she couldn’t tell.
She held up the crumpled bag from the stoop. “Rukh left you drugs.”
He rasped what she thought might have been a scrape of laughter, wincing as he did so. “Good lad. Knew he’d have something better than whatever shite they were giving me.”
Silva stepped forward, her foot nudging through a pile of empty water bottles on the floor. On the opposite wall, a plastic contraption with a tube lay on the floor, cracked.Where he’d thrown it, she thought.
In her darkest moments over the previous five years, she’d sometimes convinced herself that she hadn’t known him at all, that everything she thought shedidknow was a lie, an elaborately staged puppet play of his own . . . but she knew in her heart that was untrue. Tate held back his feelings and had acollection of masks he wore, but he’d let her in as closely as he’d let anyone. He liked control and order and tidiness.
This was anything but.
“I told Elshona to call me when you woke up.” Her voice had a sharper edge than she would have liked, with a slight tremor. “We were together at the hospital when you were . . . She said she was going to call me.” Silva already knewwhythe call had never come, she realized, but she needed to hear it from his lips.
Tate’s gaze moved back to the ceiling. “Aye, she said as much.”
Bending, she scooped up the bottles, putting them in an empty grocery bag sticking out from beneath the bed. He needed a wastebasket, she thought, wishing she’d anticipated that earlier.
“Then why didn’t she?” She still wanted to take care of him, but she wasn’t going to absolve him of this that easily.Five years.He didn’t get to come back now and disrupt her life without giving her autonomy in the destruction. She wasn’t that desperate elf anymore.
“Because I told her not to.”
Her breath caught, hands fisting the bag. He didn’t even sound contrite about it.
“Why would you do that, Tate?”
There was more bloody gauze on the floor here, added to the trash bag. She needed the distraction to keep her emotions in check.There’s a wastebasket under the kitchen sink.
“Why are you here, Silva?”
Rising slowly from where she bent, Silva stared down at him, five years of frustration igniting like a cauldron within her. “I was waiting for you to be released. I spent all day and night at the hospital, but decided I could be more useful getting things ready for you here. For you to come home.”
Tate’s eyes didn’t move from the ceiling. For a long moment, he said nothing. He was trying to keep the impassive mask he wore so often locked in place, but she could see he wasstruggling. His jaw was clenched, his muscles tight, his eyes refusing to turn in her direction at all.
“ . . . Obligation.” When he finally rasped the word out, his voice was little more than a whisper.
What do they turn into when they bloom?The conversation with the little fae at the flower market replayed in her ear like a soundtrack to the misery in the room. Promises, innocent and sweet, made in happier times.They become obligations.Hot tears burned their way into her eyes. She’d tried to keep her promise that she would live her life, and everything she’d done since that night in her old apartment had been a mistake.They become obligations.Everything but her daughter, and she hadn’t even needed tomakeher poor choices to have Aelin. But beingheredidn’t feel like an obligation either.
“Obligation and regret. That’s why you’re here. There’s no need for you to feel burdened. I don’t need a caretaker, Silva.”
“Are you sure about that?” she shot back, her anger bubbling through her tears. He was being so despicably unfair. “You look like you might. You’re a fucking mess.”
The corner of his mouth jumped, as if a smile was trying to force its way onto his lips without his full consent. There was a chair beside the bed and she sank into it. Tate said nothing, but she watched his throat move, bobbing with his swallow.
When he spoke again, his voice was still barely a whisper.
“She said you had to get back to your little girl.” He never turned his head, never pulled his eyes away from a fixed spot on the ceiling, as if not looking at her as he said the words might make them hurt less, but she could see his misery as his eyes glossed over with tears. Glossed and ran over, like a slow-moving waterfall down the side of his head. “And that’s where you should be, Silva. Not here.”
