“Did you move here from Paris?” he asked, trying to focus.
Emma looked at him over the top of her menu, fine lines wrinkling her forehead, and he wondered if she was going to call him out for avoiding her questions and changing the subject so bluntly. Eventually, she shook her head slightly as if she’d decided to let it go. “Yes. I worked there and saved up. When I had enough money to put down a deposit, I came here and opened The Holly Tree.”
Zach took another sip of his drink, wishing he could just ask her why she didn’t join a Circle. Why she’d abandoned the Order. The silence lengthened as he tried to formulate the perfect question. But he left it too long and Emma filled it for him. “I think I might have the lasagna,” she said, leaning back and closing the menu.
Zach held in the urge to groan. Of course she was having the lasagna. He could have told her that she would, it was what she’d ordered every single time they ate Italian food as children. Bloody hell, this was frustrating. She thought they were on a date, getting to know each other, but he already knew her. And small talk didn’t help him get any closer to Gordon. All it achieved was to make it more and more likely he would say something that was blatantly contradictory. Again.
He needed to move the conversation back to her. Push her a little. “You said that you don’t get on well with your father. Is he in Paris?”
“No….” Emma looked up at him, eyebrows drawn together uncertainly. “He’s in London.”
“Does he visit?” Zach asked.
“No.”
Zach blinked. She’d been so blunt and categoric. So utterly certain.
“London’s not that far,” he pressed. “Your father could come down and see you. Or perhaps you talk on the phone instead?”
Emma’s frown deepened, her mouth turning down at the sides, and he wondered if he’d gone too far. He was starting to sound like an interrogator, but he didn’t know how to stop.
Everything about this situation was wrong. The romantic décor, the soft warmth, his swirling Shadows reaching for her, pulling back, and then reaching for her again. The discomfort roiling in his belly. He was too hot. He wanted to tug at the collar of his shirt and give himself some more air, but he forced himself to stay still and watch Emma.
She took her time finding the words or perhaps deciding whether to answer at all. Eventually, she replied quietly. “My father is not the kind of man you get close to. Not if you want to walk away unscathed. He’s….” She swallowed and Zach could have sworn he saw fear flickering across her face. “I haven’t seen him in years.” Emma paused for a moment and then finished quietly. “I don’t normally talk about him.”
Zach fought the urge to grip the back of his neck and ease the tension there. None of what she was saying made any sense at all, but none of it seemed like a lie either. He’d watched her in the bakery. She worked bloody hard and she’d put a huge amount of effort into creating something that suited her. From the holly tree on the window that matched the one on her locket, down to the French pastries she’d learned to bake in Paris, it was an extension of her. Everything seemed to suggest she was exactly what she said she was, a baker trying to build a business on her own. A woman who was alone, and maybe a little lonely. One who worked too hard, but who could still smile with open joy.
But if that was true, if she genuinely never saw or interacted with Gordon, then what the hell had happened to her Shadows?
Nothing about Emma was weak. From the callouses on her hands to the way she’d built her business. So why had she seemed afraid? And why would a woman with so much to offer put up with what was clearly the worst date in history? She certainly wasn’t smiling now.
Her hand lifted to settle on her locket for a moment. The movement drew his eye and before he could stop himself the words were out. “What do you keep in there?”
Emma froze. Damn it. Now he really had pushed her too far. She wasn’t ever going to show him a vial full of forbidden Shadows, was she? And did he honestly want to know? Did he want to see the evidence that everything she’d said so far was a lie? God.
He was about to tell her to forget about it when she flicked the clasp and held it closer for him to see. “It’s….” Her fingers were trembling. Not a lot, just a tiny shudder that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been so focused on her locket. She chuckled, but the sound was lonely and sad. “It’s you—”
Zach flinched, but Emma didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy staring down at her locket as she continued. “I mean, not you, obviously. It’s my best friend from when I was a child. I thought you were him the other day.”
The locket held a small photograph, yellowed and faded with age. In it, a young girl and boy stood grinning in front of a towering sandcastle. He remembered that day. It was one of the last days they played together before everything went to shit. Back when he still believed in hope and dreams.Thatwas what she carried around with her.
His Shadows lurched and his chest contracted until each breath felt like it was being pulled in through a straw. He had let her go. He had moved on. But she hadn’t done the same. All the times she reached for her locket and he thought she was looking for some dark protection, she was reaching for him. No, not him. For the boy who had been her friend.
Emma took a big sip of her wine and looked away, out of the windows, toward the slowly darkening street. She had come in smiling and vibrant, but now she looked uncertain and off-balance. She seemed tired and a little dejected, although she was clearly trying to hide it.
Zach’s Shadows swirled out toward her yet again, that overriding need to take her into his arms building like a compulsion. He hauled them back. He didn’t understand what Emma’s game was, but he needed to remember what he was doing and why he was there. He needed to remind himself exactly what happened to people who played around with blood Shadows—and why he couldn’t touch her.
He opened himself to the Shadows and let himself see her—really see her. And the truth was horrifying. Far more horrifying than he’d realized that first day.
He hadn’t seen it because he’d shut everything down so fast and walked away. He’s been so appalled, and in all honesty, so biased. He’d seen what James had taught him to expect, and he hadn’t allowed himself to look again since then. But now he did.
Emma’s Shadows were twisted and frayed, broken even—it hurt to look at such shocking scarring—but they were not pulsing with darkness. There were no cysts or streaks of rotting decay. No blood Shadows were swirling around her or clinging to her.
As he watched, her Shadows pulsed weakly and she rubbed the skin over her left eye and then gave him a small uneasy smile.
She was still Emma. The same girl who had played and laughed with him years ago. The woman who had looked up at him with wide blue eyes and recognized him the second he’d walked into her bakery. Emma. With scars and pain and Shadows she couldn’t feel. And she could barely even say Gordon’s name without flinching.
Someone had hurt her down to her Shadows in a way that she had never recovered from, and yet here she was. Building a life. Building a home. Making something beautiful.
