“Cheska!” I said, slamming open doors. My family stared at me when I found only them inside the rooms. I raced down the hallway, the whisky blurring my vision, robbing me of balance.
“Cheska!” I shouted, knocking vases and other crap off shelves as I bounced off the walls. I needed to find her.
I love you … Her voice played in my head, threatening to bring me to my fucking knees. Her face. Her face when I told her to get off me, her arms wrapped around her waist like I’d stabbed her in the fucking heart.
I may as well have.
I love you, Arthur …
“CHESKA!” I slammed open the study door. Betsy jumped to her feet. “Get out,” I said to my cousin, seeing Cheska sat on the armchair behind her. “Cheska,” I said again, the ache in my chest numbing some as I saw the top of her head, her brown hair.
She was still here.
I pushed into the room. Betsy brushed past me. I felt her burning, narrowed eyes on me, but I didn’t look at her. This had fuck all to do with her.
The fire was climbing, and as I rounded the chair, there she was. There she fucking was … my broken queen. Her eyes were fixated on the chessboard between the two armchairs. I stared down at it to see she had moved the pieces, played the game alone. The queen was off the board, the king fucking wide open, ready to be taken down by his enemies.
His most treasured piece had been defeated.
I dropped to my knees. Cheska didn’t move. It was like she was paralysed, numbed to anything around her but that motherfucking chessboard.
I looked at Cheska’s eyes. They were dead, fucking blank. This time, my gut twisted not because of the fracture in my chest that was sending an army of suffocating feelings raining down on me like bullets, but because of the dead stare on Cheska’s face.
I’d never seen her look like this. Not even when she’d collapsed on my office floor in the nightclub. Not even when she’d woken up and the truth of what had happened had hit home again.
I’d destroyed her, like I always knew I would.
Ruined her.
In my mind’s eye, I saw her as a kid on her Chelsea home’s stairs, the first time I ever met her, all olive skin and huge eyes. I saw her in that fucking bikini on her yacht in Marbella when we were just eighteen. I saw her face when she realised who had docked beside her, the fucking obsessed look in her eyes that had never faded.
Until now.
“Cheska,” I said hoarsely, my voice cutting out. I dropped my head, feeling all the fight drain out of me. When I looked up, she was blurred, tears fucking blocking her out of my sight. “They were killed,” I said, and when my eyes cleared I saw something like pain flicker across her face.
Cheska stayed looking down at the chessboard, at the vulnerable king and his queen stuck on the sidelines. “They killed them,” I said again, and I stopped fighting the fucking feelings that had been battling to get through to me, to fucking take up every inch of my flesh and bones.
“They burned them alive,” I said. Cheska winced. My shoulders sagged, and the alcohol swam in my stomach and head. “I don’t know how to deal with it,” I said, immobilised, fucking exhausted on the floor at her feet.
Still, she stayed silent.
“This …” I said and looked up. Cheska was watching me, face shattered, fucking broken. “Feeling,” I confessed and saw the ice thaw from her expression. Ice that I knew—even in my drunken state—I’d put there.
“Arthur …”
“I shut it off. I shut it all off, after Mum and Pearl, after Dad … then after I left you that day in Oxford,” I said, letting it all spill out. All the fucking pain that I’d kept trapped inside me, that had soured and fucking rotted my flesh until it was nothing but a deadly virus running inside me, until I was numb to everything but death and rage.
Cheska shifted on the seat but still didn’t touch me. I knew she needed more. Needed me to tell her more. I closed my eyes and remembered her falling on the floor of my club. The fucking ache that started the minute she fell back into my life. Thirteen months. I hadn’t seen her in thirteen months, hadn’t felt a fucking thing in thirteen months but rage and bloodlust and darkness in the wake of our fathers’ deaths.
Then I’d seen her face. Her bloodied and beaten face, and the crack in my chest splintered through my protective walls. The feelings started stabbing at me, day by day, minute by minute, the more I was around her.
“You …” I remembered her pulling the lifeless bird from the container earlier tonight. The fucking fear, deep and gutting fear, when the container exploded and I thought I was too late. I’d thought Cheska was dead beneath me. That she’d gone. And I’d lost it.
Fucking lost it.
I swallowed the thickness in my throat, then met Cheska’s gaze. “You made me feel again. After so fucking long. After the blood and the death and all the dark thoughts …” I squeezed my eyes shut. “You made me fucking feel.”
I heard the rustling of clothes and smelled Cheska’s perfume suddenly floating around me. Hands touched my face, soft fucking hands holding my cheeks. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, if the whisky and vodka were creating a hallucination as strong as Vinnie’s. I wasn’t opening my eyes to have it all disappear. Cheska holding me took the pain away. She brought it crashing down, but she was also chasing it away.
The bringer and destroyer of everything I was.
“Open your eyes,” she said, her posh fucking accent sinking deep into my bones. Soothing all the severed and jagged-edged nerves that currently made me. The heat from her palms warmed my freezing body. “Baby, open your eyes.”
I did as she said, and there, right before me, on her knees too, was my Chelsea girl. The only one I’d ever fucking wanted. The only one I’d ever let in.
“I don’t know how to fucking do this,” I said, and Cheska’s eyes turned watery. “I don’t know how to fucking feel, how to let all the fucked-up in. How—” I touched her face, her soft skin like silk under my calloused fingers. “How the fuck do I do this?” I rasped, the emotion I was terrified of clawing through the broken tone of my voice.
“Arthur.” Cheska kissed me. Those fucking soft lips took mine, and the ache faded more and more, and so did the tar in my veins, the throbbing of my head as it replayed the video over and over again, the memory of Cheska on the ground, in my arms, unmoving …
I grabbed her waist, pulling her closer. I needed her closer. Her hands threaded into my hair.
“Let me in,” she said and kissed my neck. “Don’t push me away anymore. Please, just let me in. Fully. No turning back.”
“I can’t,” I said, instinctively trying to rebuild my walls. Close up the crack in my chest. “I fucking can’t.”
Cheska pulled back, then meeting my gaze head-on, said, “I love you, Arthur Adley. More than any woman has ever loved a man before.” The half-built walls fucking crumbled as those words tumbled from her mouth. The crack morphed into a fuck-off black abyss. “I love you, and I know you love me, even if you can’t say the words aloud.”
I groaned and clutched my head, needing the fucking pounding to stop. Eyes glazed, I looked up. “They killed them. The branded bastards who tried to take you. They killed my mum and sister. Burned them alive.”