“I see.” Her voice warbled. She didn’t see. She didn’t see at all. It was far too much to take in at once, and after such a harrowing night.
“He had a choice, you know, Jesstin.”
“A choice?”
“You and I know the Conductor was a trickster, but Jesstin... He knew it better than anyone, but on the chance he was wrong, he played its game. The final trial was a choice. He could return to you, be with you, and the truth would never be revealed. He’d have to live with it, but he’d have you. Or he could finally speak the truth but lose you in the doing. The temptation for the first option was so powerful, he knew it wasn’t the right one.”
Elloven wept into her hands. “So he chose to unburden himself and break my heart?”
“He chose what he believed would save you, knowing it meant he would lose you.” Sesto raised his hands. “Now, I love Jesstin, and so I feel compelled to expound on his love for you, but he wouldn’t want me to, and you didn’t ask for it. You deserve to feel whatever you feel, Elloven. I told you the truth because Jesstin is my friend, but I will not sway you one way or the other because you are also my friend. I did look after you for thirty-three years, you know.” He reached across the table for her hands. “And though it may be confusing to hear it, both Jesstin and I want you to be happy.”
Elloven shook her head vigorously as she stained the table with even more cursed tears. “When I saw him last night, standing over Castien, I have never felt more lost, more confused. There’s a lesson here, but I’ll be damned if I can decipher it.”
He patted her hands and gave them a loving squeeze. “But you will, Elloven. When you’re ready, you will.”
“You sound more confident than I’ve ever felt,” she said with a bitter laugh.
“You did not watch an astonishing woman tear apart the skies. If you could see yourself as we see you, you’d have more confidence than you would ever know what to do with.”
Chapter 17
The Girl Who Opened the Skies
Jesstin stood naked by the window of the rented room of Man’s Envy, the club next door to his. He cringed at the crunch of shifting sheets behind him. He’d hoped to be gone before Marissa woke, because he had no stamina for conversation. After two nights with a woman, a man either had intentions or lacked honor. His intentions went no further than flirting his way into her bed, and any talk of honor? Really?
But how could he tell her he’d murdered his own half brother to spare the woman he loved, and that, in the drunken distortion of a dim tavern, Marissa resembled Elloven just enough to send the pain away for a few hours?
And how, in the clarity of sunrise, he wanted to claw off his own skin to erase the sin of lying with a woman who was not his heart.
“I have to go,” he said, heading off anything Marissa might say that would create even more of a situation.
“No pub owner works at dawn,” she said through a protracted yawn.
His shame notwithstanding, it wasn’t work waiting for him but a two-year-old boy who would wake up soon and be scared if Jesstin wasn’t there when he did. Until he figured out what to do with him, his well-being was Jesstin’s responsibility.
“Mm, come back to bed. Nothing good happens this early. Except...”
Jesstin had gone straight from the embers of the Edevane estate to the Envy, his first drink gone before he’d even sat down. He was four deep when Marissa sidled up to the bar beside him, sending clear signals. He hadn’t looked at her head-on. It was her crimson curls he’d coveted, from the corner of his eye, as she’d answered questions he hadn’t asked, which slowly drew him further from the haunted loathing in Elloven’s eyes when she’d found him in Castien’s office.
Until that moment, he hadn’t realized he’d still been holding onto the faint hope they might find their way back to each other. They’d left so much unsaid that night in the swamp. But her eyes had said everything in that office. And he saw, finally, that in sparing her this horror, he had lost her forever.
The only way he’d ever known how to move on was to throw himself into the deepest of waters and learn to swim while knowing, on some level, he was still going to drown.
As for Marissa, she wasn’t in the trade or searching for a beau, just a bored young woman from a decent family looking for another reason to undermine her overbearing father.
They’d used each other. There was nothing more to it.
And in the light of day, Marissa in fact looked nothing like Elloven at all.
“I can’t,” he said and pushed away from the window. “Sorry.”
Marissa audibly pouted from the bed. Jesstin gathered his clothes and started dressing. When he reached for his shirt, he noticed a thin line of soot under his pinky fingernail, and blood rushed to his head. He’d missed it somehow, even after scrubbing his skin raw to erase that night. But no amount of soap and water could make him forget the look of betrayal on Elloven’s stricken face when she’d walked in on him holding the bloodied blade he’d used to kill Castien. The disbelief. The treachery. The sadness that was almost mutual understanding. But seeing her again had triggered his instinctual drive to run as fast and far as he could, desperate to replace that look with anything else.
But his tryst with Marissa had replaced nothing. He could fuck a hundred women, a thousand. Everything he’d actively done to drive Elloven Hawthorne from his heart had only embedded her deeper. Her absence was a wound that would never, ever close.
“I may just stay here for a bit,” Marissa said. She flopped back onto the bed. “The room is ours until afternoon tea?”
Jesstin cleared the emotion from his throat. “Yes.”
