His shoulders visibly drop in resignation. “We’re both fucking lunatics.” But he heaves the shovel up and back then drives it into the wood.
It gives straight away and the lid splinters. He drops to his knees and burrows his hands into the gap and pulls it apart.
Everything goes still. The only movement in the whole world is the frenzy of my heart racing in my chest.
Suddenly, of course, logic sneaks back into my brain. What if Max is in there? What if I’ve just made Caden do the most unthinkable act ever and disturb his brother? He’s going to fucking kill me. At least we’re already in a graveyard. Maybe he’ll be nice and bury me with my brother. Or where my brother’s supposed to be. Make use of the empty coffin, at least.
But the new fear dissipates when Caden turns and pins me with terrified, angry eyes. “It’s empty.”
Fuck. Fucking fuck.
I gather enough breath to say, “So, where the fuck are they?”
He turns back to the coffin and whispers, “And who the fuck did this?”
This means everything. This changeseverything. Everything we thought we knew, what we thought we lost.
The number of questions and confusion and anger swelling up in me is insurmountable.
Caden pushes up and turns to me. “Come home, Elodie,” he whispers, “we can figure this out… together.”
Suddenly, I’m rushed back to our last encounter. How things were left between us. I ran away from him. Did he come to drag me back, kill me, punish me? If I go with him, won’t it just go back to the way it was? Does this change anything between us? Saving his life didn’t, so why would this?
The trepidation makes me shake my head. “That’s your home. I’m not going back there. You don’t want me. And now I have a way more important task than being a prisoner and beaten into something I’m not. I need to find my brother.”
“And I need to find mine!” He yells but pulls himself back in, raking long fingers through his sopping hair. “Please, I… I want you to come back with me.”
“Why? So you can have a punching bag again? So you can make my life even more hell for escaping you?”
Caden slumps back against the mud wall and lifts his head to the sky. The torchlight illuminates the column of his neck, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Elodie, I just…” He drops his head and shakes it. “It won’t be like that again.”
I scoff. “Don’t think I’m dumb enough to think this changes how you feel about me. I’m not playing this game with you again, Caden, I can’t. I won’t… I won’t survive it.” I hate how I’m admitting it to him. I hate how I’m so overcome with emotion about this revelation about Lewis that it’s knocking all my walls down. But I can’t anymore. I can’t fight him anymore.
Caden rushes over to me then and he grabs my arms, but it’s not aggressive. “Elodie, I came to bring you back home. Because it’sourhome. I want…” Another rake through his hair, then places it on my arm again. He sighs. “It’ll be different, I swear. We need to figure this out together. We both have skills that’ll help us more if we put them together. This is all that matters now.”
His words are puncturing my will power. We can figure this out quicker together, but how will he treat me different? How can I trust he won’t just snap back to the same old Caden as soon as we walk through the door? My mind sifts through the last twenty-four-hours. The ice tub, the vitriol in the car at the store. The whole nearly-shooting-me-in-the-face fiasco. How can all that just go away?
“I don’t feel safe coming back.”
Caden clenches his jaw. “I will make that house the safest place for you.”
“It’s not the house that’s unsafe, Caden.”
He chews the inside of his lip. “I will not be unsafe either.”
The weird thing is, I’ve never felt safer around someone. It’s that paradox that makes my head spin in constant turmoil. He would protect me from everyone else, apart from himself.
Why do I feel so safe with a man who’s so dangerous?
I stare at him, unable to decide. The right thing to do is to say no, but the word won’t leave my lips.
“I need you to come back, Elodie,” he says, so quietly it’s like he’s afraid to say it. To bare so much of himself to me.
Most of me is screaming to resist, to refuse, to run. But there’s a part of me that’s just so tired. Exhausted from this game of push and pull between us. I could stand here and decide that he only drove all this way to drag me back so he doesn’t have to admit he lost, doesn’t have to go to his dad and tell him I left.
But there’s something in those of eyes of his as he looks at me under the rising sun of another day. Something just glimmering below the surface of the daunting green of his irises that tells me there might have just been a shift in his undying need to win. Something that matches the way he’s holding me, like he might just need me to stay… Like he might just need… me. A desperation in the way his hands travel up my arms to my shoulders, resting in the arc of my neck.
“Please,” he almost whispers.
