“No.” He takes a breath verging on a gasp. “Nothing hurts at all.” Leo covers his face with both hands, a sob tearing free under his palms, and lets himself fall back into his chair.
For the first time in eighteen years, he lets himself rest.
Chapter Thirty
Leo
Haley climbs into my lap, into my arms, and it forces out a hot wave of tears to hold her this way. Without also holding myself up and away from the fucking furniture. She asked me for this once. I gave her twenty minutes of her head on my chest, curled against my side, and paid for it with a sleepless night in agony.
I would do it again for her.
But I don’t have to.
Now she’s the one holding herself up, hesitancy in every muscle. I lean harder into the chair. Pull her in closer. She puts her head on my shoulder, giving me her weight.
I had forgotten what it was like.
For so fucking long, the only place I could touch the memory of living in a body not dogged by pain was in my dreams. Even then it never lasted. It was never complete. I could feel the cuts on my back in the distance. In the last few years it’s been worse in increments, like slowly boiling alive.
So when Hades—who looks like a fucking Constantine, how’s that for irony—handed me the second black box, I didn’t let myself imagine an outcome that didn’t involve living in hell.
I remember now, because there is no more pain. No more pressure across the scars on my back, digging into the nerves. No more radiating gashes circling around to the front of my ribs and slicing between. No more nails in the back of my neck. It’s just gone. Banished.
It won’t be gone forever. These tiny, pill-shaped miracles don’t last indefinitely. But if Hades is to be trusted—and I have no choice but to trust him—it will not start at the peak. I’ll have time. I’ll have a life.
I’ll have Haley, her sweetness curled into me, letting me hold her the way I always should have been able to.
Fuck, I was so close. So close to sinking into inescapable darkness. Haley would have stopped it, for a while. I love her too much not to put up a fight. But it would’ve happened, except for that prick with the strange eyes blocking my path.
That pain was a cage. A physical cage, yes. One that held me away from the physical world. And an emotional one. I don’t know what to do with it, all that feeling.
Eventually the floodgates close. The grief eases.
“Are you sad?” Haley brushes an errant tear from my cheek.
“No.” I kiss her, and I feel nothing but the softness of her lips against mine. Nothing but the way she takes a quick little breath. Nothing but her. “I’m free.”
We go back to the party, and Haley can’t stop staring at me. Studying my face. I want to tell her it’s the same as it always was, but it’s not. I know from the way her eyes shine.
I want to fuck her without having to ignore impending torment. It hurts less when I’m inside her, when I’m touching her, of course it does. Of course it did. But this is different. Being in that much pain was like being numb, in a way. It didn’t give me full access to any other sensation.
When the bedroom door is locked behind us, I unwrap her like an engagement gift and lay waste to her panties and bra. I open her like a blooming flower on the bed and bury my face between her legs. She tastes even sweeter for how little it hurts to do this. I can sling her legs over my shoulders and make her come like that. I can let her dig her heels into me while her orgasm shakes through her. I can do fucking anything.
She’s tired from the party, so tired, but she gives me all of her. Haley whimpers and cries when I punish her pussy for the crime of being so fucking perfect and cries some more when I fuck her throat.
Her tears are drying when I take her to the pillows, spread her open wide, and make her take me all at once. I love the sight of her body when she works for it, all blonde hair and pulsing muscles. I love the struggle. I love to bite her, and hurt her, and make her pussy tighten in that sweet, filthy rhythm as she comes all over me.
Haley interrupts her own series of moans with my name. “Leo. Leo—”
I bite her again, and she makes a sound of pleasure-pain that I would like to hear every day until I’m dead. “Say it some more, darling.”
“Leo,” she says, and the excitement in her voice makes my chest ache. “Do you think I could be on top?”
I freeze, my cock buried in her to the hilt, and in the space of this one moment I’ve been shoved out of the bed. Out of my body. She’s been on top before, but never the way she’s asking for now. No one has.
Except for Caroline.
I push up and away from her. Need room to breathe. It’s awful, it’s fucking awful, because I want to keep fucking her. But this innocent question from the most innocent Constantine there ever was has nicked an invisible wire in my brain, or my soul. Somewhere hidden. Way down deep.
And it’s now, it’s right now, that I understand the final piece of my penance. I understand that there is something separate from the experience of physical pain. It’s always been easier to let the torment of fucked-up nerves take up my attention, because something else did equal damage. It played an equal role in turning me into the beast I became.
“Leo.” Haley’s voice is so soft. She’s been saying my name for a while now, I realize. “Come back. Leo.”
I bend my head down to her collarbone and lick the bite mark I left. Concentrate on how warm she is around me. How tight, how soft. Let that feeling tamp down the urge to run. Not away from Haley. Never away from her. Away from the sickening memories.
“I’ve never done that before,” I confess to her, and then amend my confession. “I haven’t done that since Caroline. Not in—not in a bed.”
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, Leo.”
I don’t hear pity in her words, and that, I think, is what compels me to tell her the rest.
I have never told anyone the way it was with Caroline. The way she insisted on being with me. I was too young to see it for what it was. Not a real preference, except a preference for power. She wanted to be the one on top, literally and figuratively, so that’s how it was. It might not have left so many scars if it hadn’t been for that very last day.
The day I took the videos. I’d been suspicious of her by then, suspicious and increasingly sick to my stomach at how it felt to be with her, and I thought the camera itself would act as a kind of talisman against more of her psychotic behavior. Surely she would assume I had one and call it off. Or come to the meeting as Caroline Constantine, de facto queen of Bishop’s Landing.
She did neither. She did worse. And I have paid for it with every kind of pain every day since then.
“My back was nothing but an open wound,” I tell Haley, and she does not tense underneath me. She doesn’t flinch. She just keeps running her hands over my shoulders, over and over. “The sheets felt like sharp rocks. Like fire. And the pressure of her body—”
“It’s okay,” she says. She means keep going.
“There was no one before her.” Haley glides her fingers through my hair. “And I never thought this would be possible afterward. I didn’t even fantasize about it.”