Her fear is quieting.
“Rosabelle,” he says desperately. “Are you still there? I’m still here.”
She blinks softly, her eyes glazed. Her heart rate has begun to stabilize; the alarms have begun to retreat.
“Are you okay?” he asks her.
Her hands tense and release; color moves slowly back into her cheeks. Her fear is being slowly displaced by calm. A crush of exhaustion. Acute longing.
A faint rush of desire.
My jaw tightens.
The two of them together generate an emotional load so turbulent I can’t quite distinguish one from the other. It’s surgical work, separating the threads, tracing each back to its source.
James, of course, has never been subtle.
But Rosabelle—
She turns her head against her pillow, her face flushed. Then she looks up at my brother and experiences a shock of pain so brutal and unexpected I take a step back.
I hear her intake of breath.
I think I’ve seen enough.
“James,” I say quietly. “I need you to leave.”
“What?” He straightens, detonating before me. Anger; fear; frustration. “Why?”
I press my fingers to my forehead, trying to release the tension. I’m suddenly agitated. Fatigued.
“We’ll talk about this later,” I say to him. “Right now, I need you to go.”
“But—”
“I’m not going to kill her.”
Rosabelle turns sharply to look at me.
James is nonplussed. “But—”
“We’ll talk about this later,” I say again, meeting his gaze. My head has begun to pound. “For now, I need to you to trust me.”
James looks between me and Rosabelle a few more times before I feel him finally, begrudgingly relent. He swears under his breath, working the anger out of his body before he turns to Rosabelle.
“I’ll see you later, okay?” he says. “I promise. And don’t worry, Warner’s not as scary as he looks.”
“Don’t lie to her,” I say coldly.
James shoots me a hard look.
There’s a spike of fear from Rosabelle as she watches us warily, saying nothing. She doesn’t say goodbye to James, not even as I feel her pain rising as he leaves. Instead, she watches him go with intention, her eyes lingering on the door even after it shuts behind him with aslam.
It’s a moment before Rosabelle turns to look at me.
We lock eyes from across the room and, almost instantly, her emotional feedback goes cold. She reverts back to the dead battery she was in prison.
Astonishing.
