Sylvie had cried, then, for the first time in Mallory’s presence, her face pressed against their joined hands, contorting as she tried to hold back the tears that wet both their skin. She was glad her aunt was too delirious to know.
And as the sky turned black and it got really bad, Mallory’s pain increasing, her breath taking on a labored rattle, a nurse standing in constant vigil, Sylvie had pressed that little glass deer into her aunt’s hand, wrapping her fingers around it.
She had lain beside her on the narrow, hard bed, cuddling her one last time, her forehead touching Mallory’s temple. “It’s okay.” A whisper in her ear, for her alone, for them alone. The hardest thing she’d ever done, to steady her voice and dry her eyes and put every bit of love in her heart into those last words. “You’ve given me everything you had and everything I need. It’s okay.” Her eyes had squeezed closed. “It’s okay to go now.”
In a place neither of them wanted to be, but under the starry sky they both loved, Mallory had slipped away.
And the deer had fallen from her fingers and shattered against the black linoleum floor, a thousand fragments of crystal sparkling in the light.
Cool, firm lips were pressed against her temple. Closing her eyes for a moment now, as she had then, Sylvie breathed deeply before she turned her head and looked up at Dominic. He was holding her, his arms wrapped around her without hesitation, his body sharing its warmth.
For once, the expression in his dark eyes was transmitting clear as day. Deep concern, but primarily empathy. The bone-deep understanding of someone who had walked a similar path.
“Which piece?” he asked, inclining his head toward the glass cabinet without taking the comfort of that steady connection away from her. “Which one took you back there?”
“The deer.” As she slipped her hand into his, she looked at it again. It was unmistakeably an Arielle Aubert, so similar to Mallory’s that it might well have been on the same shelf that day in Paris, a sister work. “It’s the deer.”
She felt a slight tug on her hand, as if he were unconsciously trying to pull her away from the source of obvious pain, and she shook her hand.
“It reminds me of the worst night of my life.” Like that long-ago companion in the dark, this deer had incredible eyes, so expressive in such simple lines. She could feel the tight traces of tears on her cheeks, but her body felt calm now. Peaceful. Comforted. “But also—more so—some of the best times. And it’s beautiful.”
When she looked up again, Dominic said nothing, but very lightly, once more, he touched the back of his free hand to her cheek.
And once more, she repeated the words in her mind and in her heart. “It’s okay.”
They’d progressed from soggy bottoms and burnt crusts in previous seasons to outright assassination attempts.
Death by incineration.
Dominic knocked back another half glass of milk and exhaled through his mouth, trying to suppress the residual flames burning through every taste bud. Mariana was still bent over Sid Khan’s countertop, her face cradled in her hands, muttering to herself. Once she’d regained the ability to speak after her mouthful of Sid’s Hello, Dolly! cake, he’d heard a rasping repetition of “Mierda.” Followed by an equally blunt “Fuckin’ A.” The moment the first burn of chili had hit his tongue, he’d knocked Sylvie’s piece out of her hand before she could bite into it; unfortunately, he’d been a second too late in preventing Mariana from putting her entire slice into her mouth. He was surprised she was still conscious.
The cake—seven layers of chocolate with a “hint” of chili, according to Sid’s initial intro—lay abandoned on the countertop. The elderly widower’s structural design—Horace Vandergelder’s top hat—wouldn’t have scored highly for either ingenuity or difficulty, even if the man hadn’t packed in enough heat to sear the hide off a rhino. However, any official critique on this one seemed a bit redundant.
The poor bloke was just about in tears, turning his own hat over in his hands as he apologized profusely for the thirtieth time. Sylvie had her arm around him, trying to gently tease him out of his misery, while Aadhya and the medics bent over Mariana.
Draining the last of the milk, Dominic shook his head at the medic who tried to approach him with a blood pressure monitor. “I’m probably about thirty percent grayer than I was five minutes ago,” he said wryly, touching his temple. “But it was only one bite. I’m fine.”
“Are you?” Sylvie had left Sid to the sympathy and support of his fellow contestants. She searched his face. Her hand moved to touch his chest; he doubted she was even aware.
Certainly, she’d appeared to be entirely driven by instinct when he’d been bent forward, coughing his guts up after his bite of the aptly named Lucifer’s Sponge. Sylvie had been at his side, rubbing his back, pushing milk at him. It hadn’t passed unnoticed that she’d gone straight to him before she’d tried to help Mariana. Quite a few crew and several contestants were sending speculative glances their way.
And Dominic’s own instinct was to shield her from the scrutiny. She was still pale after the events in the third-floor gallery, a star scattering of freckles standing out on her nose. A fresh dusting of powder had removed the traces of tears from her cheeks, but he could still see her in his mind, standing staring at the little glass deer. Completely still, her mind obviously miles away. Or rather, years away. Despite the misdeeds of Middlethorpe’s mini-me, the true haunting had been in her eyes then. Before she’d returned to the gallery, to him, her arms had come up and folded around her body, as if she was holding herself. Or remembering reaching for someone, holding someone, who was no longer there.
Over the years, he’d had relationships with women, generally playing out at a very surface level on both sides and ending amicably. None of those experiences had left or inflicted scars.
But there were other bonds in his life that had—not broken but splintered his heart, chiseling fragments away.
Today, part of his heart had fractured for someone else’s pain.
It would have been quite possible to step away, mentally and physically, from the intimacy that had unexpectedly ramped off the scale last Friday night.
But the way he’d felt today at the Grange, when Sylvie had been genuinely frightened and she’d burrowed straight for his arms, when she’d stood alone with her memories, her chin held high and her eyes wet with tears—
Understatement of the millennium to say this was not what he’d expected from this period of contractual proximity.
He could still feel the press of her lips, the teasing dart of her tongue, a satin stroke against his own, and the sense of utter . . . rightness sinking into his bones as she wriggled close.
It was as if she were settling inside him, a constant warm little light in his chest.
“I’m fine,” he repeated in a low voice.
Mariana had recovered her composure and the full use of her lungs. “Mother of God,” she said, coming over to join them. Her eyelids and cheeks were red, and even the single strand of silver hair stuck to her forehead was extreme dishevelment by her usual standards. “His recipe called for a quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper. That was like inhaling a Carolina Reaper. How the hell do you make that mistake?” Barely pausing to draw breath, she added severely to Dominic, “But don’t go and ask. The poor man feels bad enough without a De Vere decimation.”