And something else.
“If you ever do something so fucking stupid again…” he snarls in rapid French, beautifully carved chest rising and falling. “You’ll get a lot more than a spanking.”
Defiant, upset that he would spank me like a child, stunned that I enjoyed it, I make to scramble back. To put space between me and the man staring down at me with a warning that only increases the hum between my ears. The suffocating knot choking my airway.
“You don’t understand,” I scream at him. “You don’t know what it’s like—”
“To lose the people I love?” he throws back in my face, equally loud, equally drenched in pain. “I have lost everybody,petite idiote. I lost them. You are all I have left, Lenora.”
He’s right, of course.
In the haze of my own suffering, I hadn’t considered anything else.
Him.
How this would affect him. How he would feel waking up in the morning with me a broken shell across the pavement.
The pain I would have caused him, the grief of having yet another funeral the day after he buried his sons…
I burst into tears. Jagged, heaving sobs that my body refuses to even contain as I struggle to breathe in between.
Gentle hands grab me, possibly to comfort me, but all I taste is self-loathing and the brewing hatred rising up into my throat.
“Don’t touch me!” I wail, swinging blindly. “I don’t deserve—”
He’s stronger, or maybe I’m a liar, but he drags me into his lap. My legs are twisted around his hips and we’re sitting with an intimacy we shouldn’t be in the center of his bed.
But I don’t care. Nothing matters but the fact that he makes the world stop spinning. The moment his arms crush me to him, I can breathe. I’m no longer drifting but crawling to solid ground.
And I hold him tighter. I strangle him with my arms and weep into the curve of his neck.
“I’m here,mon p’tit.”His fingers work through the knots in my hair with gentle, soothing strokes. “I won’t ever leave you.”
It’s a lie.
A well intentioned one, but a lie all the same.
Ushers don’t live. Not long. Our time is measured by seconds. Mere fragments. A blink and one of us is gone.
He lost his wife when the boys were ten. I lost my parents at fifteen. All the people in between — and there have been so many — dropped away one by one until the only Ushers remaining are me and Uncle Marcus.
And I will lose him.
I know it with the same certainty as I know the sun will rise in a few hours.
Over his shoulder, somewhere in the room of mirrors, I hear the faint click. The subtle tap of steel on glass. The scrape of razorblades. The raw, bloody skin around my wrists pangs.
I shut my eyes and I tighten my hold.
“Promise me you will never do anything that stupid again,” he’s saying when I focus. “I have already buried my wife. My sons. My brother. Too many friends and loved ones. I have attended more funerals than any man should. But,” he turns his face into the side of mine, “if I lost you, Lenora, if I had to bury you…”
His fingers fist my hair. Tight. So tight, strands pull from their roots. Incite fresh tears.
His free arm snakes around my middle and I’m curved in, closing the remaining space between us. I catch myself on the warm skin along his shoulders and ignore the rise of warmth that always blooms when he’s close.
“They would have to bury me, too. There would no longer be a reason to go on.” His hold loosens and he lifts his face just enough to graze our noses together. “You are all I have in the world,mon petit.I refuse to live without you.”
I shouldn’t.
