“No,” he exhales, heavy, like he’s still not in control of his lungs or his pulse. “Restless. Helpless. I wanted to …”
He doesn’t move my hand, doesn’t ask me to uncoil myself from him, but he also doesn’t tell me what he wanted. He moves on. “You were readingThe Bell Jar. Interesting choice for a bedtime story.”
“Aren’t all untethered souls soothed by reading about someone who lost their mind? And if that wasn’t enough tocompel me, how could I not be drawn to the savage recount of the Rosenberg executions in the opening pages? There’s nothing like the deaths of spies to get a girl thinking.”
He chuckles, but it’s pained and brittle, perhaps fraught with the realization that my fate is quite possibly similar. “Do you feel like her?”
Do I feel like Sylvia Plath?He wants to know if I’m suicidal. That is audaciously tender in the brutalness of my reality.
“I don’t think so …” I trail off, pondering that because perhaps the uncertainty is answer enough. I’m struggling—betrayed by my family, my colleagues, my own existence—but I haven’t welcomed that type of escape plan, though maybe that’s because of Axel, because of the family I’m growing attached to. It leads me to tell him something else. “The reason I’m here—not the purpose for the mission, but here at La Lune Noire—is because I ran from another.”
He stiffens and peers over his shoulder at me, his expression lined with worry.
“Ikind ofran from it,” I amend. “It hadn’t started yet. And I … I think it was fine. Someone else went. It was far away, in another country, which I do all the time, but it would’ve been my first long-term mission. They’d warned me it could take years to complete, that it was dangerous. So much so that contact with my family would’ve been almost nonexistent, too risky. I wasn’t afraid, but I was … sad. Maybe even panicked. I had to get married for it, part of my cover, and he told me he’d cheat on me, but that for the sake of the mission, I couldn’t … I didn’t care about that because I didn’t want him. But the idea of marriage—it made me miss my mom.”
“So, you took a different job here because …”
“Because it was a more tolerable option. My brother arranged it, but my father wasn’t happy. I just want you to know that I was already in trouble when I arrived, so if things go …poorly, it has little to do with you keeping me locked in at the resort.” When I sense him readying to speak, I offer another token of vulnerability. “I also came for a piece of my mother, and even though it hurts, I got that. Ever since I began training for that other mission, I’ve been debating whether I should be grateful she’s not alive. Seeing what I’ve become would’ve killed her anyway.”
He unclasps my hands from his waist, turns, and cradles my face. “She was good and vibrant, and so are you. If she were here, that’s what she’d see. Don’t let all the ways others failed you taint how impressively you sculpted those ashes.”
Only the king of the underworld could look at me and see any good at all. Maybe that demeans it. I’m sure it would for many people. But I lap it up, letting it plaster over the voids inside me. With his sapphire gaze on me, the warmth I’ve been missing hugs me in a safe cocoon.
On a ragged breath, he catches a tear clinging to my lower lashes, and a varnish of torment stains him before he schools it. “I need to attend to some things.”
“Do you ever sleep?” I ask, desperate for him to stay.
Please don’t leave me.
As if my silent plea were shouted, we’re both instantly aware of me in his T-shirt and a tiny pair of panties.
“Not much,” he supplies as his attention sweeps over my legs and the expanse of empty bed. The sight of me here, in the dusty twilight of his room, plainly washes him with resignation. He kisses my forehead and shrugs on the suit jacket that was lying beside him, his voice assuming that authoritative tenor. “Rest for a few more hours. If you want to remain in your own suite after this, I’ll allow it. Maybe it’s even for the best, but I’d feel more comfortable if you stayed with Tessa and Maddox in their spare room.”
Moving back a little, I shake my head and bend my knees to my chest like a shield. “I’m not hiding out anywhere. And I’m not inconveniencing everyone for my choices.” I want him to understand that while I’m younger than him, I’m not naive. I can accept my fate. “Very few people outrun this life. I was aware of that going in.”
For all I know, I could be their enemy. I want him to trust me, but he shouldn’t. None of them should. And that realization only amplifies the chill, the loneliness seeping into my bones.
“Were they really your choices?” he bites out with unrestrained anger—not directed at me, but simmering on the surface nonetheless. With it, the same stress he exhibited during that panic attack wafts from him as he strokes his forehead.
But this time, I don’t want to climb on top of him. I want to kick and scream and cry. I want to tell him that for some inexplicable reason, that look on his face is harder to bear than it would be from anyone else.
There is no stopping the scoff that leaps from my lungs. “You’ve clearly had a bad night, but the last thing I want from you while I’m in your bed is your judgment.”
He grips my chin again, this time with more urgency than compassion. “I don’t judge you, darling. You judge you.”
My eyes dart between our proximity and all the space he insists on putting between us, no matter how much I open myself up to him. “So you say, and yet …”
He turns away, back to the position I found him in, elbows on his thighs, shoulders rigid, weary and haunted. “That’s me judgingme, on your behalf. The only thing worse than tempting your own fate is tangling it with mine.”
I’m not sure what he means by that, but I believe him. There’s an ominous tone laced through his words. Monstrously authentic. And regretful maybe.
My breaths pant out until I’m certain he’s counting them, measuring their cadence, and wondering why I’m not responding. Only then, when I know he’s probably aching as much as I am, do I speak. “That makes sense, or it doesn’t, but either way … I’m here.”
“I couldn’t survive touching you again and walking away, Zara.”
Oh, my heart.
That presumably means he’s determined to walk away from me, which is a dagger in itself, but it’s the earnestness of his confession that slices through me. I want to beg him to be reckless, to chance it with me because I don’t think I’d survive it either, but the alternative is too bleak for me to endure. I barely want to wake up tomorrow, but the thought of rising to a world that has no hope for us is intolerable. There’s no one I’d rather dangle from a precarious cliff with.
