Living with Embers: (Son of Rain #4)
Page 17
I wanted to request that she put our child down before Ava was hurt, but I figured that would only make the situation worse. Because of the possible danger of her doing something silly and hurting Ava, I didn’t answer her question.
There was also the fact that I had no idea how to answer it without causing her more pain. Because it seemed easier. Because it meant I could be in a position to find out the truth. Because I wanted to. None of those reasons would satisfy her.
“I stood up for you!” Her voice pitched higher and louder as she continued.
Had the guards Aiden threatened to set around our room already moved into place? Were they about to come storming in?
She continued to rant at me, and it was clear she wouldn’t be satisfied without some answer.
I gave her the best one I had. “I didn’t want to frighten you.”
“Are you freaking kidding me? You didn’t mind that at all a few seconds before your miraculous turnaround. You know, when you were trying to kill me.”
My gaze dropped to her feet. It was too painful looking at the hurt in her eyes. Not because it strangled my heart, but because her pain twisted around every muscle in my body with a vice grip.
For a moment, it seemed she was about to make some more noise and make things even harder on me—not that I didn’t deserve it—but then she paused and took a breath. “Why didn’t you want to scare me? What made you stop?”
I tried to articulate the feeling I’d had when she had her outburst.
“You didn’t kill me.” That was the pivotal moment. She’d held the knife against my throat, and it would’ve been easy for her to end it all. I would have if our places had been reversed—and she’d known that even as she spared my life. “Then your pain was so apparent that it made me think maybe you weren’t lying. I witnessed the raw emotions of your tears and your anger. They were both so real that I realized you had to be telling the truth. Based on what I’d seen, I couldn’t justify your death any longer. I’d thought you were evil. A seductress willing to tempt me back to your side with the power of your spell, but I could see I was wrong. Everything I saw with my own eyes contradicted what I’d been told about you. At that time, you needed help and I was willing to offer it. I never claimed to have remembered anything about you.”
“Told about me? By who?”
“By Dad.” I shrugged and shifted my gaze to her. It was too easy to get lost in the hurt in her eyes.
“Dad?” Her voice was farther away and filled with obvious fear. Did that prove there was some truth to Dad’s concerns, or was it all part of the lie?
Despite the turmoil and confusion rolling through me, I tried to remain calm as I risked a glance back at her. She placed Ava into the crib beside her brother. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing. It might have meant she was planning to attack me.
“He found me in Alaska,” I started the story and continued the tale of Dad finding me there.
“I should have known he was involved in this somehow,” Lynnie said when I’d finished. “Why would he do this to you? To us?”
The tone in her voice set me on edge. Dad had just been trying to watch out for me. What gave her the right to judge him so harshly? “Why do you assume that he did anything?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. Before I could try to figure out what her reaction meant, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “For starters because it’s too much of a coincidence that out of anyone in the world who could have possibly found you in the Alaskan wilderness, it was your dad. Why would he have even been there?”
“He was there with me before I lost my memory.”
A murderous expression flashed over her face, but she stamped it down just as fast as it appeared. Then she explained that I’d apparently gone to Alaska with Ethan, which tied in a little with what Dad had said. Not enough that I was going to stop listening to Lynnie’s explanation though.
“Ethan,” I tried his name out again as memories of our confrontation in Lynnie’s driveway crossed my mind again. “My brother.” Things shifted inside of me. Although I still didn’t understand everything that was happening, there was one immediate thing I needed to know. “He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?”
She chewed on the inside of her mouth as she gave a small nod. “Apparently he will.”
I tried for a smile and failed. It was hard to give any sort of sign of happiness when so much hurt and disappointment still echoed in Lynnie’s eyes. “Good.”
When she spoke again, she accused Dad of leading both Ethan and me to Alaska, and then of deliberately stealing my memories. There were elements that made some sense, but I couldn’t align the care he’d shown when he’d found me with the heartless things she was accusing him of.
“That’s a pretty big accusation. Especially coming from—”
“A freak?” She put her hands on her hips and cut me off.
Once again, I slipped into nonchalance because it was easier than showing any of the twisting pile of questions, doubts, and emotions within me. “Exactly.”
“I wonder if he was behind the púca as well. Ethan said it was acting strange.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the word púca, but I had no idea who or what that was. All I could focus on was her continued accusations of my father. I defended him because he wasn’t there to defend himself. “He’s not a monster.”
She looked in genuine pain as she closed her eyes and let out an exhausted sounding sigh. “No, but he thinks I’m one.”
It was true. Everything he’d said about her, everything he’d shown me, agreed with her statement. It left something major unanswered though. “But if I cared about you as much as these photos seem to illustrate, if that wasn’t just some trick, wouldn’t he want me to be happy?”
“I wish it was that simple.” Her anger had burned out and she instead sounded tired. “He probably thought it was a way to get at least one of his children on his side. He probably even thought that if you were working with him, you’d turn Louise and Ethan to his viewpoint.”
Once again, I felt like I wasn’t just missing one piece of the puzzle, but that I was missing every piece but one and didn’t even have the box to guide me. “Why?”
“Because in his mind, you turned them to my side.”
The things Dad had said to me played through my mind. I didn’t have many memories, so the ones I did have replayed on an endless loop. Everything he said fit into the boxes she’d provided with her words. Everything.
When I applied Dad’s statements to her, things didn’t fit the same way. It was trying to shove star-shaped blocks into triangular holes—one corner fit but the rest never could.
Lynnie moved closer to me again. “Regardless of everything that happened between all of you, I do think he loves you three . . . in his own messed up way that is.”
It confused me even more that she would defend him. If things were as bad as she indicated, if he’d deliberately hurt me and tried to have me murder the one I apparently loved, why would she defend him?
“So if you were mistaken about your belief that I wanted to hurt you, and you are no longer obsessed with hunting me, what are you going to do now?” She asked the question without malice, and with more interest than was probably appropriate.
My brow dipped as my head spun. The influx of information was too much. The day had been too long. I still didn’t know who to trust or who had lied.
“I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. I hated that my voice sounded so pathetic, but I couldn’t wipe the insecurity from it. “I’m not sure I’m ready to go back to Dad just yet, at least not until I know the truth about a few things. I think I need a little time to work out what’s real and what’s not.”
Like the canvas print.
Was that real?
Did I feel like that?
Had I lost that sort of contentment forever?
“We look really happy,” I murmured as I turned back to look at it.
“I wish I remembered what it felt like to be that happy,” I admitted, more to myself than to her. “It would be nice to feel something other than hate and confusion.”
“You really don’t remember anything?” The words slipped from her, accompanied by a fresh round of tears.
“I really don’t, and I really hate that because I can see so much love in these photos and I just helped deliver a child who looks exactly like me.” My fists clenched at my sides. I hated seeing her in pain. Hated it even more because I was the cause of it.
No, I wasn’t.
He was.
The man in the canvas print. The one who claimed to love her and then let her down. The one who had become me. It was his fault for letting this happen to him.
“It’s clear that we were happy at some point, and somehow I did something to ruin that. You said so yourself. Now I’m left to deal with the fallout of the mistakes of another man and I hate it.”
Her tears disintegrated into crazed sobs.
Once my words had started, I couldn’t stop them. They flowed from me like water. “I hate that you’ve made me doubt what my father told me, that from the very first time I heard your voice, I questioned everything he tried to make me think was true. I’ve been trying to convince myself that he had to be right.”
Her eyes flicked up to mine, and I had to back away from the pain buried there. It burned my insides like acid.
“I hate that I allowed him to manipulate me into trying to hurt you and that I didn’t know better before I did potentially irreversible damage. I hate that I believed the vicious things that he said about you and about the fae—especially now that I see that this place is like one giant family where everyone genuinely seems to look out for one another.”
There seemed to be little truth in Dad’s words, but part of me still resisted the idea that he’d done it with the intention of hurting me. Surely he’d been looking out for my best interest, even if he’d gotten a little muddled on what that was?
Despite needing to get away from her, from the agony of her tears, I moved closer.
“Above everything else, I hate looking at you,” I said.
My breath hitched as she glanced up at me with tear-filled eyes.
“Since I told you the truth, there’s this look you keep giving me.”
She seemed confused by my statements.
“Every time I so much as glance in your direction, I see you staring at me with the same look in your eyes.”
She stared at me with that exact look. It echoed disgust, need, desire, hatred—a thousand conflicting emotions racing through her body that all added up to one conclusion.
“It’s like I’m disappointing you for something that I didn’t even do; something I can’t control.”
Even though she’d been sobbing before, it was clear when she fell to pieces in front of me that she’d been holding so much back. No more.
Now, her sobs were so violent, they shook her entire frame. It wasn’t just a cry from her eyes and her lungs, but came from her heart and echoed through her body.
I couldn’t resist the lure of helping with her pain a second more and wrapped her in my arms. Just as all the turmoil in my own body fell silent at the embrace, she stepped out of my hold.
I dropped my head. “I’m sorry I can’t be who you think I am.”
To our side, one of the babies started to cry.
“I think you should go.” She dismissed me over her shoulder.
I couldn’t go though. Not only could I not leave the room as per the fae directive, my body wouldn’t act to leave her while she was in pain.
She lifted our son from the crib before turning to me with eyes that begged me for things I could never deliver. “Please?”
Even though I didn’t want to leave her in pain, I wanted to grant her request. I just couldn’t. “I’m under house arrest, remember?”
Something in my statement caused her to flinch in pain. She asked me to head into the en suite while she fed our son instead. That I could do.
To force myself into some sort of action, so I didn’t rush back out to see if she’d stopped crying, I headed into the shower. I didn’t have a change of clothes, but that didn’t matter.
Before I jumped under the running water though, I made a quick phone call.
“I was worried about you, son.” I had to swallow down all the rage that surged through me when I heard Dad’s words. “Is it done?”
“There was a complication,” I said.
“Not another fucking complication. You promised me you’d get it done. You—”
“Ethan was there.” I cut him off. “He tried to fight for her and I shot him in the chest.”
A tiny exclamation echoed down the phone. “What?”
“He was in the way.”
“Is he okay?” Then in almost the same breath he added, “And what about the phoenix? Is she gone?”
“The baby arrived and there were too many fae to attack.”
“Christ. Where are you now then?”
My next words would confirm for him that something else was happening, but I had to say them. If by some slim chance he was telling the truth, or he could be made to understand what I could see, I didn’t want him to panic. “I followed them to their court.”
“What?” The word was so loud it echoed through the small bathroom.
“It’s okay. I have them convinced that I’m on their side for now. I’m safe.”
“This is a dangerous game you’re playing. You don’t understand how the fae like to twist logic. They play with emotions like a child might play with toys. They conjure up false images so that you believe what they want you to believe.”
Before hearing the phoenix’s statements, I might have believed him. Now, I was more inclined to believe her version of events. There was just one thing I needed to work out, and that was whether he was spinning deliberate lies or whether he was just genuinely misinformed. What happened next would change based on which of those two possibilities was true.
After I ended the call, I slipped under the water and let it clean away the sins of my day. I hadn’t realized I still had Lynnie’s dried blood on my legs. I would need to get a spare set of clothes as soon as I could. I toweled off and waited for my cue from the phoenix.
In one way, Dad was right. She could call me to her like a hawk to his falconer.
Something told me the person I was before would have willingly walked into fire to be with her.
But he’d let her down.
And I had to deal with the fallout.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“SO I WAS thinking . . .”
Lynnie had called me out of the en suite when she’d had an apparent epiphany. She had yet to explain exactly what that was, but had tried a couple of stuttered starts so far.
She dropped her gaze from mine and the words seemed to flow to her a little easier. “We need to convince everyone that what I said wasn’t a lie.”
I frowned in question. Admitting the truth had taken so much of me, and she wanted me to forget that and go back to the lie.
“I think we need to convince everyone that you’ve got your memory back and that you’re not the person who attacked our—my house this morning.”
“You want me to keep pretending?”
She went on to explain that she thought if we continued the lie I might escape punishment. The thing she didn’t seem to understand though was that I deserved punishment. Even if she could forgive me for trying to kill her, I’d attacked the fae guards without remorse. I’d even shot Ethan. When I voiced my guilt, she shook her head sadly.
“Knowing what you now know, would you do it again if you had the chance to do it over?”
Did she think I would? Or was this her show of faith in me? Either way, it didn’t change my answer. I shook my head.
She wanted my freedom as much as I did. Maybe more. It was what she needed to heal, that much was clear. She finished laying out her plan, it would end with us returning to her house only to have me leave her under the guise of our relationship being too hard with the twins involved.
“Won’t they all hate me for leaving you alone with two babies?” It wasn’t the question I wanted to ask, but it was the one that came out of me. What I really wanted to know was whether she’d stop me from seeing my kids after that happened. It seemed unfair given the way the whole thing had been thrust upon me to have them ripped from my life just as suddenly.
I didn’t want that. Although I was bound to Lynnie in ways I didn’t understand, I was certain I could walk away from her if I had to. I wasn’t sure the same was true for our babies. From the first instant I’d stared into our son’s eyes, I belonged to him. I hadn’t had nearly the same opportunity to have time with Ava, but I was certain the same would be true for her. They owned me completely, even if I didn’t remember anything about their conception.
“Maybe, but what’s the alternative?” She went on to say that she didn’t want me to suffer for my mistakes.
Even as she said the words, it grew crystal clear that she wouldn’t be able to pull it off. She held herself so apart from me, as if she expected me to draw a gun on her at any second. I didn’t blame her for that assumption, but there was no point her perpetuating the lie if it was doomed to failure.
When she asked me why I thought it wouldn’t work, I reached for our son who was snug in her arms. Fear flashed in her eyes and she curled her arms closer to her chest, shielding him from my touch.