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Interesting. Very interesting.
“Good?” I ask.
She lifts her chin. The motion is small, but I see the ghost of The Widow in it.
“He is alive?” Her question makes the room go silent. Edward’s head lifts sharply, and Lazarus closes his eyes, the final act. I feel it opening before me like a door. The others would have waited, would have wrapped her in blankets and soft voices and endless patience. They would have let The Collector rot below us for years if that was what her healing required. I understand something they do not, Olive does not need to be protected from her rage. She needs it returned to her, carefully. At the proper moment, like placing a blade back into a queen’s hand, so I step closer.
Edward stands. “Darkness.” A warning.
I ignore him, but Olive does not step back as I approach. Good girl.
I stop several feet away.
“Yes,” I say. “He is alive.”
Her throat works. “He is here?”
“Yes.”
Edward takes a step toward us. “Olive, you do not have to—”
She raises one hand and he quiets, a faint, humorless smile touches my mouth. There is power still, buried, perhaps, bruised but there.
“When?” she asks.
Lazarus’s voice is rough. “When you are ready.”
Olive looks at him, then at Edward and back to me, “I do not know what ready feels like anymore.”
No one else answers, so I do. “Ready is a lie people use when they are afraid of beginning.”
Edward’s eyes flash. “Enough.”
Olive keeps looking at me. “Then what is real?” she asks.
“Want.” The word cuts through the room, her fingers curl.
“What do you want, Olive?”
My question lands with the weight of a key in a lock. Her lips part, but no sound comes, so I wait. I do not push. This is delicate work, not gentle. Delicate. There is a difference. Olive looks toward the darkened window, her reflection stares back at her, thin and pale and trembling. Then she looks down at her hands.
Hands he bound. Hands he painted, hands he tried to make ornamental. Her fingers flex, once then twice. When she looks back at me, there is something in her eyes I have not seen since Austria. A small fire.
“I want,” she whispers, “to remember how it felt to make men afraid.”
I smile, there she is, not healed. Not untouched by what was done, but there.
I bow my head. “Then we begin.”
Edward moves to Olive’s side. Not touching, but near enough if she asks. Alcott stirs within me, frightened and hopeful and aching and I let him feel it. All of it, because he should know, we are getting her back, not as she was, never as she was. The old Olive died somewhere between the ship, the room, the scar, and the year of silence, but death is not always an ending, sometimes it is merely a change in title. Widow, our survivor. I know what waits beneath Olive’s quiet. I recognize it because rage does not disappear, it sleeps, and when it wakes hungry enough, it remembers everything.
42. Ghost in My Home – Olive
The Grey
Home should feel like relief, for a bit, it does. Le Havre smells of lemon polish, lavender soap, coal smoke, old wood, and women’s perfume. La Sirene glows beneath the evening lamps, mirrors catching familiar colors until the walls seem alive with movement. The courtyard remains stubbornly itself, with ivy crawling over brick, girls laughing too loudly near the fountain, and Thanatos perched along the roofline as though death itself has decided to supervise my return.
Morrigan follows me everywhere whether at the manor or my own home. At first, I think it is affection, then I realize she is guarding me. My ocelot sleeps at the foot of my bed. She sits outside the bathing room and she hisses at anyone who moves too quickly near my chair, a reasonable creature. I wish I were reasonable too, but my body has become a country I no longer govern. A dropped tray sends me to the floor with both hands over my head before I remember where I am. A slammed door steals every breath from my lungs. As a hand at my back, even gentle, even loving, can turn my stomach to ice. Some mornings, I wake certain there are bindings around my wrists, when there are not. Some nights, I taste blood and bile and his cologne.
