The word ‘don’t’ tries to eke out of me, but all the protest I can make is a small groan that tells him everything I can’t say.
‘Please kiss me.’
‘Please love me.’
‘Please tell me you’re mine.’
He feels it, hears it, slips his arms around my neck too tenderly. So tenderly I want him to squeeze the life out of me with them. I want to die here in his arms. End it all. Have him end it for me and be the last thing I see before I go.
I want to die.
But I have to survive.
My arm flings out, smashes into his, and I fling him off, whirling away.
I can feel his eyes on my back from halfway across the room. I should keep going, walk out, but he moves first. His chair scrapes against the stone floor, and this stupid protective instinct that brought me here takes over. “Sit down and wait for Evander. You can’t go anywhere like that.”
But he only staggers a few steps to the dressing table, the surface covered in makeup, glitter, all the accoutrements of the cruel show, to where a bottle of sparkling wine sits in a bucket of ice next to eight shining glasses. As though Robin was going to have friends back to celebrate what he’s done.
He rips it out of the bucket, splashing ice water across the table, making pools in the paint that dripped from the brush when he was painted up onlyan hour ago.
Before he was a killer.
The bottle slips from his grasp, thudding down on the table, and I rush to steady it, to stop it from dropping and breaking on the floor.
He turns his shaking hands over, staring at his palms, gashed and bleeding. They’re a mess. And it’s so exactly like those bastards to have made those rocks so sharp.
“Fuck, Robin. Let me wrap your hands.”
The shake of his head is barely perceptible. He grabs for the bottle, and I have the flash in my mind’s eye of him twisting the top open himself, ripping his wounds apart, tearing all the skin from his palms.
I catch him at the wrist. “I’ll open it.”
Slowly, he lifts his eyes to meet mine. “We’re the same now, aren’t we?” His other hand takes hold of mine, turns it over, and he traces trembling fingers across the scar on my palm. “I’m becoming like you, aren’t I?”
I can’t tell if he meant for that to hurt. Hurt like a thousand razor blades dragging across my heart. But it does. I never want him to be anything like me. I wish there were a single thing I could do to stop it.
I pull my hand away, gently, so I don’t hurt him, and work the cork from the bottle.
“I thought of you,” he says, voice soft and strained.
I take a glass, pour the wine for him, right to the top.
“I understand.”
I don’t know what to say to him. So I only pass him the drink. He takes the glass in hand, downs the lot, then holds it out again. I fill it.
It’s tense, quiet, nothing but the sound of the drink bubbling. How beautiful this scene could be in another time, in another place. But here, this wine serves one purpose.
He takes the glass, drinks the lot. Holds it out.
“That’s enough.”
An incredulous laugh rips from his chest, then he lunges for the bottle. But I have faster reflexes than he can muster after that match. He gives up almost immediately, muttering only, “What the fuck do you care?”
“You’re hurt.” My eyes drag over his body. I’d like to avoid looking—to not have to see this form I’ve adored torn up like this—to not have to care. His arms are purple and blue with enormous bruises, scrapes all down his forearms from climbing the cliff. The black surgical string criss-crossing the flesh of his leg is stark against his cold and pale skin, where Evander sewed him up. His outfit is torn at the shoulder, across his stomach, and red and purple injuries from the fall mark him all over, from Elijah landing on him, fighting him. And that’s just on the outside. “If you make yourself sick, it’s going to hurt. You can have more later.”
The smile is wide and mocking. “Always the captain, aren’t you? Always above all things, Captain Marco Verus. If only they knew.”
