“For how long?” she asked, though timelines seemed more arbitrary than ever.
“I don’t know. Weeks, months, maybe longer.” Emory toyed with a loose button on the flannel shirt, rubbing the mother-of-pearl between his thumb and forefinger. “Look, I know you didn’t choose to come here and now you’re not given a choice on how to leave, but?—”
Amelia pressed her index finger to his lips. Stunned, Emory’s eyes widened at he stared at her.
“No.”
“No, what?”
“Don’t do that. I didn’t choose how I came here, but I can choose how I leave, and it’s with you. I choose you, Emory. Everything you are now, not what you might become one day.You.That’s it. That’s my choice.It will always be you.”
Amelia expected a protest from him but found none. She’d made up her mind and there was no talking her out of it. She would walk the path with him deeper into the underworld where, in the sweetest of ironies, she’d found belonging.
“What do you want, Amelia?”
The answer was him.
Always him.
Emory kissed the pad of her finger still at his lips. “About last night, those things I said in the parlor.”
Amelia had almost forgotten. It seemed trivial and hardly worth relitigating. Emory gathered her hands and held them to his chest. His heartbeat fluttered against her palms.
“I fucked up and said the wrong things because I have a knack for that. What I should’ve told you then because God knows I felt it well before now is, I love you, Amelia. I don’t know what my future holds, but I know I want you in it, and I know we belong together, now and always.”
“Now and always,” she repeated, faintly quizzical and dazed because love never came easy for her nor had it ever ended well.
When it came at all, it was always with a great deal of convincing; convincing herself that it felt right or convincing others that she was enough. There’d be none of that, and she found in Emory a mirror to herself—the earnestness in which he offered his heart and the gravity of that moment when he made it known.
The path ahead would be difficult—that much she knew—but loving him, loving each other, would not be, and she took solace in that. Soon, she’d extract from it her strength and perhaps that was where she’d derive her fearlessness; fearless enough to love a man like him, fearless enough to let him love her too.
Amelia twisted the loose ends of his hair around her fingers and kissed the scar on his top lip.
“I love you too,” she said, her body finally rid of the chill she couldn’t seem to chase away.
A devilish smile unfurled on Emory’s lips. “I know you do.”
Amelia laughed. “Okay, cocky.”
“No, it’s not ego talking.” Beneath her, the tension in Emory’s body released like a knot coming undone as he contemplated her. “It’s the way you look at me. I wish you couldsee yourself in those moments. Don’t ever stop looking at me that way.”
“I won’t. I promise,” she said, her lips grazing his in another soft kiss.
Emory’s tongue slipped into her mouth, and Amelia relished his familiar taste and the warmth of his body beneath her.
“What is it?” she asked when Emory pulled away enough to look at her.
“I’m getting out.We’regetting out. Together.”
“How? I thought…”
“If I see the Moriartys through war, Liam will find me a way out. This will all be over, and we’ll have our simple life together, the one we both want. I just need you to trust me.”
Wild with hope, Emory spoke on a hush the secret they’d share. He was less manic than he had been earlier but still convinced they could walk away and leave this all behind.
He entreated her to pour faith in him and endure. But it wasn’t about endurance. It was the duality of trust. Like her father used to say when Amelia learned to drive,“I trust you, but not the loonies you’ll share the road with.”Amelia trusted Emory implicitly, but not the organization where snakes and rats and other duplicitous creatures lurked.
While he might escape his blood oath, who was to say the Moriartys would survive the war? Perhaps that was what her father meant by big death. The institution was doomed to fall eventually. She let that go unsaid. It’d only spoil the moment where Emory wove their wants together and offered an escape.
