He nods as she speaks, confirming this. “Yes, and now you dine with me. Unless you’d prefer to go back to the old shed.”
It isn’t a question, but its lilt makes her pause as she watches him unfold the napkin on his plate and lay it over his lap.
She’s silent, not knowing what’s expected of her, or if she should simply sit still and be quiet.
“Don’t sentence me to a silent meal,” he says, his brows drawing just as Ella enters the room, wheeling a tray with two plates and a bottle of red wine on it. “You’ve met Ella.”
Moira nods, offering a small smile in the woman’s direction, but Ella’s eyes don’t meet hers.
Once the food has been served and Ella leaves, Sol pours Moira a glass before filling his own.
“What is your talent, girasol? Other than bravery to the point of stupidity,” he muses before taking a sip of his wine.
“Archery.”
“A waste of time,” he says in response, the words immediate.
She wants to remind him that those items he deems a waste of time had killed a few of his own men, but decides it better that she not, lest she want to reside in that chair once more. “Procure a bow and arrow and I will gladly change your mind.”
He smiles but it’s mostly with his eyes as they crinkle in the corners.
She doesn’t break the eye contact, instead, tilts her head just a fraction.
A moment passes between them before he sets his glass down and clears his throat. “Why do you not say my name?” he asks her.
“Do you not remember it yourself?”
Sol smiles a wicked smile and she’s reminded of the crash of cold water on her bare thighs. Of the internal screaming and her secret room inside her consciousness, where she goes to hide.
“You are confused,” she whispers.
“Because you sit with food in front of you after days of hunger and refuse to dine.”
She glances down at the plate for the first time, the sight of the steak and vegetables before her causing her mouth to water. “Aye, but that isn’t what I mean.”
He waves his hand and lifts his knife to slide it through his steak.
She’s never before witnessed such elegant eating. It unnerves her, how easily he slides the blade through flesh. “Do you hate me? Or do you wish to save me?”
“If you are accusing me of confusion, I’m afraid I have to convict you of the same.” He lifts a fork, holding a perfectly cut piece of meat, inspecting it. “Do you want to live or die?”
“Most days, I do not know,” she answers, as honestly as she can.
“What do you know?” He finally places the morsel in his mouth and chews, his eyes never leaving hers.
“I know that monsters are simply creatures driven by fear. So, what is it you fear then, monster?”
Sol swallows his bite far sooner than he should’ve. It annoys him, how unnerving this young woman is. How she can push him to the point of nervousness, to the point of nearly choking on his own food.
He reaches for his wine glass and gulps its contents down.
He ought to take his steak knife and cut through the little bitch’s artery, the one that jumps deliciously when he’s close enough to smell her.
Yes, Sol has finally found the impassive girl’s tell. The glitch in her stoic features.
“Am I a monster?” he finally answers, offering a smile that lasts a hair of a second.
“That’s what I knew you as, far before I knew your name.”
And it’s true. He’s gone through great lengths to keep it so that she still knows him as such. Still, an ache blooms in his chest at the thought that he could offer her sanctuary—albeit it conditional—and she still see him as this beast.
“I have no fear,” he tells her as he cuts through his steak once more. “Only anger.”
“Perhaps you fear a lack of anger.” She finally—finally—lifts her glass to drink. “Without your anger, who would you be, Sol?”
The sound of his name causes him to scrape the plate with his fork, a noise that has him clenching his jaw, wanting to flip the table. “You cannot save me, girl. I’m not a damned man looking for redemption.” His fork and knife meet the table with a clatter.
“I’ve sinned beside you. You can hardly think of me as a savior.”
While he rages, she remains as evenly spoken as she’s been since she entered this room.
“And yet you’re as bright as all things good.” He says it through gritted teeth, as though he begrudges her the sun in her eyes and the fire in her hair and the milk in her skin.
“And yet,” she says, setting her glass down, “I am still here.”
“Not if you continue to goad me. I’ll take you in the shed and let you rot.” The lies feel like acid on his tongue and he spits the words out violently.
She doesn’t need to tell him that she doesn’t believe him. It’s in the way her eyes are cast downward, the way she doesn’t cower or quake.
Sol let the sun demon in.
And she will burn him.
14
Sol’s first memories of his mother were of her singing.
Melodic sounds that filled his chest with an overabundance of joy.
Even as time passed and he heard each song less and less, he still sought comfort in the words alone. Some nights, when he yearned for her, he’d hum them to himself until he fell asleep.
And the day her songs stopped altogether, he tried to understand why. To find her and bring her back home.
As he lies in his bed, his knee aches at the memory. And just like the radiating pain in that joint, in the years that passed, he found no absolution. His anger aches as truly as his knee does.
Sol turns over, bringing the towel with him. Moira is somewhere in this house, sleeping in a bed he had delivered yesterday. In a room much plainer than this one.
His desire to see her in such a peaceful state is overwhelming. It is a treachery to his cause.
“Leave that girl alone, Sol,” he whispers to himself, happy with the privacy to be driven mad by that girl in his own solitude.
Because in those years that’d lacked absolution, they were filled with other things.
With work and death, blood and stolen fortunes, men who pledged to his cause and men who betrayed him.
Sol makes a living as a killer. As a man people contact to end another’s life—for a sum. And these few grand rooms are laced with that blood money.
After all these things, his spirit is in great peril.
All because of the girl sleeping peacefully in this dead house, whose eyes like dreary rain pierce his darkness.
Moira’s own mother plagues her thoughts in another part of this home full of men who would kill her. If the man named Sol ever gave them permission to.
What would she be like if she’d witnessed her mother’s affection? If her mother’s deep-seated disappointment in her daughter—who pushed every rule as if she were created to test seams—hadn’t festered and raised her?
Moira likes to think that her venom came from injection rather than nature itself. That the reason death receives no objection from her is because her mother had made it so.
And then she thinks about her old nanny. And the lonely days of the week when she would go away and tend to her own life; a life Moira knew nothing about. And the child didn’t dare ask, lest she make her upset and never see her again.