He was right.
The correction landed with the force of a door closing.
“I apologize.”
Cove looked startled by how quickly I said it.
Then suspicious.
Then tired.
“Don’t make it sound so easy.”
“It is not easy.”
“Then why do you keep doing it?”
“Apologizing?”
“No.” He lifted his cuffed wrist a fraction, the chain swaying between us. “This. Acting like we can have normal conversations and then casually offering me pieces of the world while keeping the rest of it locked away.”
I followed the chain’s movement. There were no marks beneath the cuff anymore. I had checked obsessively, to thepoint that Cove had snapped at me about it several times. Still, the metal looked obscene against his skin.
“Because I don’t know how to do this correctly,” I confessed.
“That’s not an excuse.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You keep saying things that sound like excuses and then agreeing with me when I call them out.”
“I am not attempting to excuse myself.”
“Then what are you doing?”
I looked at him.
His hair was loose around his face because he had refused to let me braid it and refused to let Ben bring him any of the clips from his bag. The cuff connected us. The tanks surrounded us. The house held him because I had decided it must.
And despite all of that, he had asked.
Notwhy did you kill him?Notwhen will you let me go?
Butwhat are you doing?
“I am trying to keep you,” I said quietly before cringing at how it sounded. “That came out incorrectly.”
“No,” he said. “I think it came out exactly right.”
“Cove—”
“You’re trying to keep me.”
“Yes,” I said, because lying would be worse and honesty, however brutal, had become the only remaining thread I could offer. “But not as an object.”
He laughed, hollow and disbelieving. “You have got to be kidding.”
“I know how it sounds.”
