Reason and manners I usually hold so dear abandon me and I find my palm settling lovingly against the curve of his evening kissed cheek. The stubble prickles skin, but I am too captured by his misery to properly enjoy it.
“Please forgive me,” I whisper through an endless stream of tears I can’t stop. “I only wanted…”
“I know what you wanted, Linny. But they wouldn’t want you to join them like this. They would be devastated.” His hand, big and warm, so capable of pain and kindness frames my cheeks.His thumbs brush lovingly at my tears. “Swear to me you will never—”
“I don’t know how to live without them.” The words escape in a rush of anguish carved from the very pit of my grief. “All my life, I’ve had them. Every second of every day and now…”
The hold around my middle tightens. His exhale ghosts across my wet cheeks. My lips.
“Je sais, mon petit.”He sighs again and repeats quieter, “I know. If I could take their place—”
My palm slaps over his mouth. A clammy barricade refusing to acknowledge his dangerous confession.
“Don’t,” I plead, voice a broken rasp. “I don’t want that either. I can’t lose you, too.”
Because I love him.
I love him with the same reckless obsession I have for the boys. Not the love a niece should have for her godfather, but the kind that no one would understand. The kind shunned in the Bible.
Even if I knew my boys were waiting for my lead where their father was concerned, waiting for me to make the first move, it felt like too much for a single person.
Not that it matters anymore.
The gentle brush of his mouth against my palm sends a flurry of heat up my arm. It settles over the echoing chill numbing my insides, but it’s not enough.
“You need sleep.” My wrist is captured and drawn down. “Your room is a disaster, and I don’t trust you alone. You take the bed and I’ll take the floor.”
Already there are cracks in the warmth between us. Icy razorblades slice every inch of exposed skin as he begins to withdraw. His arms grow slack. And panic sets in.
“Wait.” Nails cut into taut muscle as I hold him to me. “Please. Don’t let me go.”
Pain coils through the pale surface of his eyes and hardens his jaw. Tightens his arms. I’m back against him with a renewed, crushing force.
“Mon cœur—”
“I know.” My arms lace back around his shoulders. My face finds home in his neck. “I just … stay with me, please?”
He will not refuse me.
It’s a certainty I know to my core. Uncle Marcus would give me the sky if I asked for it.
It’s this knowledge that fists my insides and twists. It’s the understanding that he would move heaven and earth to make me happy, but I can’t return to that room. Not with their scent still fresh on my pillows and that thing lurking in the corners.
“What do you want, Lenora?”
Pain. The single word leaps to the forefront of my mind.
Sorrow.
I want those responsible to watch as everything they love shrivels up and dies before their eyes. I want them to feel what they’ve done with a brutal vengeance that would tear a hole through the very fabric of time.
I want blood and death. I want to hear them gasp for their last breath and watch the life leave their eyes.
A fair trade, I think. They destroyed my world. It’s only fitting that I burn theirs.
My gaze shifts to the mirrors, to the thing I feel watching me, waiting for that last slip of my sanity. Waiting to take what’s left of my soul.
“Uncle Marcus?”
