“Shut up.”
“It’s true.”
“Fuck off.”
“You have color in your cheeks,” he pointed out. “And you’re communicating again.”
I hated that it was true. I hated that it was him who pulled me out of the hellhole in my head, the inferno I, myself, couldn’t claw myself out of. More than anything, I loathed that the dark place I used to run away to in the hospital, and that first week in the cabin, was now unreachable. I had nowhere to hide. I had to face all of it.
The past. The future. And the decisions they both dictated.
“Take me home to Tiernan and Lila.”
“Soon,” he said, unaffected. “Let’s give you a bath. I ordered pizza.”
Pizza sounded good. Actually, it sounded really good.
My stomach growled loudly, asking for garlic bread rolls, too.
I realized I was famished.
Famished like I hadn’t been since Europe.
Hunger. I really was starting to feel again.
And this was bad news, considering the biggest threat to my heart was less than a heartbeat away.
Chapter Forty-Two
Achilles
One more monthlike this and she’d have loved me back.
It would have been Stockholm syndrome at its finest.
One more month, and she’d be mine.
But that wasn’t the way I wanted things to be between us. Not anymore.
And so, despite my natural predatory instinct to use every dirty trick in the book to get what I want, I found myself driving her back from Maryland to New York, to her cunt-bag of a brother.
She was alert the entire ride, staring out the window. Even though she didn’t talk, I knew this wasn’t one of her dark spells. The color was back in her face. Her eyes were shining again, her pupils responsive to what was going on around her.
It comforted me to know she was okay. For weeks, I’d watched her breathe while she was asleep, living but barely alive, acutely aware that her vulnerability was also my own.
I savored every fucking second with her in that car like it was my last on earth.
It wasn’t fair that I was still losing her when I’d finally gotten my head out of my ass and done the right thing.
Only it was.
It was fucking fair, and I knew it.
I had made her life hell, took the thing most important to her—her freedom—and then nearly killed her on top of it.
She had every right to forgive me at her own pace.
That pace could be tomorrow, in ten years, or never at all.
