by Lana Sky
“How are you feeling?” I ask, approaching the side of her bed.
She laughs weakly. “You don’t have to pretend,” she says. “I know that I scared you. I know how I look. At least someone can see the obvious.” Her gaze cuts beyond me to the doorway, and a hint of what could be pain distorts the green irises. “I read the papers,” she croaks, clutching the blankets draped around her. “He promised me he wouldn’t… Be honest with me—”
“They were lies.” Driven by an impulse I can’t name, I reach for one of her hands and clench it tight. “He never assaulted me.”
“But he did hurt you,” Masha says firmly. “I know he did.”
My lips twitch to form a rebuttal. Maybe not for Blake’s sake, but for his sister’s peace of mind. As exhausted and frail as she looks, there’s a coldness I vaguely recognize in her gaze: resigned fear. She doesn’t want to see him as a monster. At the same time, she’s not naïve.
“I… He didn’t hurt me,” I say, but the words fall flat. Hollow.
Masha sighs and stares down at her hands. “You don’t have to lie to me.” Gingerly, she disentangles her fingers from mine and turns to stare out the nearest window. “Sometimes… I’m so sick of being the victim. The pawn. Even Blake. I love him so much, but he’s the same.” Her gaze meets mine, burning brightly for the first time during this visit. “Maybe the only way to beat them is at their own game.”
I say nothing. Her words resonate deeply enough without requiring agreement out loud. Their game: vicious lies and cruel manipulation. Could I ever be so callous?
“Thank you for coming,” Masha says, snapping me from my thoughts.
I awkwardly back away and reenter the hallway, where I find Blake lingering near the doorway, his expression tense.
One glance at me and he grits his teeth, nodding just once. “Let’s go.”
We return to the car, but I don’t recognize the direction the driver heads in.
“Lunch,” Blake proposes, sounding hesitant. “Or a walk. Or a fucking drive around the city. Anything to…to just talk.”
Hope flares to life in my chest, a painful, pathetic thing. “Okay. A drive.”
The driver may be listening, but this moment feels too damn fragile.
“What did Masha say to you?”
I don’t miss the careful note in his voice. “Nothing,” I say, but the truth is obvious in what I don’t voice. She asked me if he was a monster, and I couldn’t find the words to deny it. “She looks better, at least,” I finish, stumbling over the words. “Healthy—”
“She’ll be fine,” he says. “I’ve arranged to have her transferred to a more familiar facility upstate. She’ll…she’ll be fine.”
Again, he alludes to the fact that this isn’t her first stint in a hospital. A part of me wants to demand more answers, but I keep seeing her face, that fragile innocence. In the end, all I can do is stare out the window and picture how I must have appeared to my brothers when I was in her place. Maybe I was too selfish to see it before, but now, their concern makes a bit more sense and I hate myself for causing it.
“It feels strange to be back,” Blake says, breaking the silence. “I…I thought about you.” He takes my hand, this time cradling my fingers against his palm. “Every damn day. God, I thought of you…”
Words fight to squeeze their way past my thickening throat only to fail. I thought of him too. Every moment. Every second. I couldn’t not think of him.
“Those days,” he adds, his voice deepening, “I play them over and over. They feel like a fucking dream. Sometimes…I wonder if it was even real. If any of it was real.”
“It was.” It had to be, because those days were all I had left. I still cling to them like an addict to her very last vial of poison.
“I still remember.” He laughs, the sound broken, echoing off the close quarters. “Your laugh. Those stories we used to tell.”
“Humpty Dumpty,” I say, my voice barely a whisper.
“Yes.” He nods. His other hand captures my chin, tilting my face toward his. He’s closer, his mouth nudging mine, a silent demand to open. He doesn’t kiss me when I do. He merely breathes, inhaling every breath I exhale. “I know that things can’t ever be like they were. But…I want. I need…”
“I know.”
We say nothing else, spending what feels like an eternity trapped in an intimate embrace, sharing the same air. The same space. The same pain.
We can’t ever go back. Brandt Lloyd is dead, along with his fiery princess, Snow.
We’re the jagged shells of those two innocent souls, left behind, forced to find some semblance of self again.
But maybe we can find a way to meld our broken edges.
Or stab each other with them.
Chapter 13
Blake
She always was the only person in the world who could make the ugliest situations reveal their beauty. Like finding solace in a mental institution or crafting an imaginary world for a boy desperate to escape his own personal hell.
They used to wonder why I spent so much time with her—them, the onlookers and gossips and petty, spiteful neighbors. Maybe I was deranged? Or degenerate? Or awkward with people my own age?
But they were wrong.
The silly little girl with stars in her eyes could make an afternoon shut indoors with only books to read compelling. To her, nothing was ordinary. A bad day was the worst one in the universe—for that moment. A good one, the very best, at least until the next.
She always saw magic in every moment.
And she always ignored the darkness in me.
“You’re thinking.” Her fingers dance a trail up my forearm, luring me back to the present. Halfway up my elbow she pauses, her gaze lowered as if registering the act for the first time. Silently, she pulls away.
But I stop her.
“About us,” I say, maneuvering her wrist so that her palm is upright. “You really were a pain in the ass.”
She gasps, playfully offended. “I was your pain in the ass.” Her face falls as the full weight of her words lands between us.
My pain in the ass. Just not anymore.
Something in my expression must change because she sighs and tries pulling her hand away. “I’m sorry—”
“You don’t have to walk on eggshells around me.” I let her go and turn my attention to the nearest window. The world passes by in a blur, and I indulge the dramatic irony: ten years without her have passed much in the same way.
A blur. Colorless and empty.
“I feel like…” She sighs, fidgeting beside me. Her hands run aimlessly through her hair, twisting the soft curls. “I feel like I’ve forgotten how to say the right thing. It didn’t use to be this hard.”
Hard. My jaw clenches at her use of the word and I can’t fucking help myself. “Was it easier with him? Daniel Ellingston?”
She inhales sharply. “Please don’t do this.”
“I don’t mean it like that.” Fuck, maybe she’s right. It’s so fucking hard. “I mean in that… He didn’t scare you. I do.”
She can’t deny it. Even now she sits angled toward the door on her end, maintaining a hairsbreadth of distance between us at all times. Her eyes dart warily toward mine and then away again.
“You don’t scare me.” I have to strain to hear her. “You don’t. I scare myself. Because every time you lash out. Every time you flinch when you look at me, I remember…”
She doesn’t have to say it.
I remember who you used to be.
A person I can never be again.
“Do you want me to leave?” I keep my tone intentionally soft as my entire body stiffens. I feel like a fucking fool at the gallows, waiting to be hung on her say so.
“No,” she says and some of the tension in my body eases. “But… Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.” She jumps and as my voice echoes back to me, I realize how goddamn eager I sounded. Feral. “I mean, you can ask me anything.”
“Masha’s…fine,” she says, testing out my term. “But what about you?”
I clench my jaw, steeling myself for what she might say. “What do you mean?”
She swallows hard and then tentatively adds, “Do you still have those nightmares?”
My blood runs cold. Nightmares. That’s a delicate word for it—when she really means waking up, shouting like a fucking madman, chasing phantoms in the dark.
“I shouldn’t have asked,” she says quickly. “It’s none of my business—”
“I don’t like talking about it,” I admit, hating how cold I sound.
She nods, her hands fluttering over her lap. “My brothers had me hospitalized after the gala. Did you know that?”
Her words land like a sucker punch—not that she intends for them to. Redness paints her cheeks. Embarrassment? Before I can be sure, she turns away from me again, eyeing the view passing beyond the windows. “Their one condition was that I see my therapist once a week—and I haven’t even called to set up one appointment. Why?” She shakes her head and fingers one of her loose curls. My own hand twitches, aching to tuck the strand behind her ear. Like I used to I realize.
She’d play with her hair whenever that bastard Forrest said something that sent her running to one of her hiding places. I’d chase her down and smooth my fingers through the tangled mess she made. Always.
“Why?” I prod as her silence extends to nearly a minute. “Why not?”
She inhales, her face tilted toward me a fraction of an inch. “Because despite what happened recently… We both know where the true damage is.”
An answer springs to my lips. “The past.”
She nods. “And I don’t think I’m brave enough to go there. Not yet. I can’t—”
“I know.” I don’t smother the impulse to touch her this time. She stiffens when I ease the mangled curl from her grasp. It’s still soft, despite the damage done by a forced hair-cut and cheap dye. The damage I did.
“Have you gone to therapy?” I can hear the skepticism in her voice.
“No,” I admit, frowning. “What could I say?”
That I was convicted of a crime that I didn’t commit, accused by the girl I loved. That the man I believed was my father liked screwing the neighbor’s wife—when he wasn’t smacking me across the face for fucking breathing.
Anger seeps in and for a cruel second, I’m back there. In that place. As that kid. I’d take every blow without a word. Or complaint. I never fought back.
Until now, I never understood why.
“Blake?” Snow runs her fingers down the side of my jaw, and I know she’s reliving it too. The many times she would trace my bruises while simultaneously pretending they didn’t exist. “Are you alright?”
I shrug her off, swallowing hard, squashing those memories. “I’m fine.”
But I’m not. My gaze hones in on her fingers, so soft and slim. In them—figuratively—she has a whole wealth of information to use against me, if she wanted to. My past. Her pain. The worst part? I couldn’t stop her if she decided to.
If. And if she did, my first instinct is one I never felt when Harrison Lloyd raised his fist. With him, I cowered. But against her?
I want to fight. Bite. Snarl.
That bastard could beat the shit out of me, but I never felt wounded. Harrison Lloyd could never truly hurt me.
Snow on the other hand? She could leave me. Turn against me. Hate me…
And there’s no need for a goddamn therapist to spell out what would happen next.
Her betrayal cuts deeper than any bruise.
And if I’m at her mercy again…
She’d fucking decimate me.
Snowy
* * *
We return to the suite, retreating to separate rooms as if by an unspoken agreement. The need to lick my wounds drives me into the bathroom and I strip, climbing into the tub and turning the water to the hottest setting. Steaming.
Outstretched beneath the scalding liquid, I feel no closer to sanity than I did the first night I dared to take on Blake Lorenz. God, I was so stupid back then, barely three months ago. I was a fool.
And now?
I’m reckless. My mind goes to Masha and the torment that drove her to the unthinkable. But was I ever any different? I let my emotions shape my weight, knowing what I was doing to everyone around me. I knew the risks.
But when I wanted to fall…I stubbornly fell.
Only one boy was ever there to catch me. To shake his head at my broken pieces and instruct that I put them back together myself. King’s men or king’s horses couldn’t mend me; only I could do that. Only he would force me to.
But, now, that boy’s grown up, and the king’s lost his softer edge. He’ll break me apart sooner than he’ll put me back together. It’s the only way we know how to coexist.
The sound of a door opening snaps me into awareness. I jump, realizing I never locked the door to the bedroom or the bathroom. Both are easily flung aside, revealing a creature with eyes blazing like hellfire.
“B-Blake?” I scramble to cover myself, not that his eyes ever leave my face. It’s as if he fixes his gaze on mine deliberately, honed with rage. “What’s wrong?”
“Interesting conversation you and Sloane had,” he snarls, throwing something at me.
It lands in the bathwater with a splash and I scramble to catch it before it can sink. The unfortunate object turns out to be a tabloid, its cover soaked through.
“You want me to be honest, but have you been?” he demands while I read the scandalous headline: ABUSED HEIRESS TELLS ALL.
My heart sinks as I scan the first few sentences. With allegations of abuse against Blake Lorenz from heiress Snowy Hollings swirling, a close personal friend of the heiress tells us she regrets her failed engagement to Daniel Ellingston…
Oh, Sloane. I don’t even blame her. Our relationship was always transactional.
“You can’t even fucking deny it. I knew it. I fucking knew better than to let down my guard around the irresistible Snow.” Blake barks out a hollow laugh, shaking his head. There’s almost a desperation to the action—relief? “And there it is,” he adds nastily, “that goddamn thing only you can make me feel.” He forms a fist, bringing it toward his heart as if he means to pummel it from his chest. At the last minute, he storms from the room.
Exhausted, I sink back, tossing the magazine aside. My eyes drift shut, and I focus intently on the warmth seeping into my aching muscles, buying myself more time before I have to face reality beyond these walls. So many false stops and starts. This one feels like yet another vicious yank backward. At the same time, I suspect that the rumor was nothing more than an excuse. The first thing he could latch onto to guard himself again.
Because this scares him.
It’s terrifying me.
Eventually the water cools too much. I can’t hide here anymore, and I crawl into a towel without bothering to dry myself first. Dripping wet, I enter the hall, wandering with grim determination into that darkened room at the very end.
He’s sitting on the bed, his back to me. Faint moonlight sneaking through the curtains gives his hulking shape vague definition, dusting his hair and outlining his shoulders. They’re hunched, radiating tension as I cross the threshold.
“Get out.”
I don’t. Instead, I let my steps carry me carefully over the bare floors, swaying to keep my balance. Both of my hands clutch the towel to my front, and in the end, I let it fall before mounting the mattress. “You don’t get to storm away every time something pisses you off,” I admonish, my tone deliberately soft. “You promised we could talk. So talk—”
“Stop it.” He lurches to his feet and marches toward the windows, stubbornly eyeing the sliver of view visible. “Not now, Snow.”
“Come here and talk to me.” My voice rings out, stronger than it should be considering that I’m breathless, gasping for air.
He growls, almost snarling in frustration. “I said get the fu
ck out—”
“Then come to bed at least.” I flatten my hand against the space beside me, loud enough for him to hear. “Come lay beside me. You look exhausted.”
“No.” His teeth are bared, visible in his snarling profile. But it’s more of a plea than a refusal. Wavering control humanizes him like nothing else. I can see it fighting to combat the hate he seems desperate to cling to.
“Blake,” I say, calling him by name. “Come lay beside me.”
“I’m not a goddamn child.” He turns, his body hunched forward, his eyes narrowed. “And I told you to get the fuck out—”
For the first time, he seems to realize just how I must appear: wet and naked, outstretched on his bed. Submitting. He swallows hard, his expression wavering.
As the cold air assaults my damp skin, I extend my hand. “Come.”
A curse escapes through his clenched teeth, but the next second, he advances like a man possessed. The bed lurches beneath his weight as he lies down with his back to me. Carefully, I shift toward him, letting my fingers sink through his hair before he can rake his own through the wild curls. A sigh runs through him, jolting me in the aftermath. He doesn’t relax into me. Never lets down his guard.
All he does is close his eyes with a begrudging hiss.
And I give him five minutes of silence. Of peace.
But then I can’t resist.
“Do you remember?” I ask in a whisper, still stroking his hair as much as I dare. My fingers twitch sporadically, gliding through the wild strands, but he doesn’t call me off. Yet. “You never could sleep when something was on your mind.”
He tenses at the mention of the past, his unease acting like a shield, threatening to cut him off already. “I remember a lot of things about the past,” he says, his tone laced with warning.
This time, I don’t back down from the threat. “So do I.”