“Free will.” A small pause. “Tell me what you see when you close your eyes.”
On his command, my lids fall shut.
And, just like that, I’m whisked away on the grotesque wings of my worst nightmare.
“Shocked blue eyes,” I breathe out, shuddering at the memory as it plays out before me in my mind’s eye. “I felt his surprise, right there in my gut. I felt like it was my own. It was . . . something that I couldn’t have anticipated, not ever.”
“What else?”
I tangle Saxon’s shirt around my fingers, winding it in and out between each digit, simply for distraction. Still, I keep my eyes squeezed closed, as ordered. “The fear—the way his hands jolted up like . . . like he could make it stop. The bleeding. His body going into shock. But there was nothing he could have—” I break off, breathing heavily as the memories assault me. It hurts. It hurts so much to remember, and shouldn’t I be satisfied? I did what I set out to do. I killed the king. But all I can see is his expression and now there’s no stopping the shudder that wracks my frame. “I’m sorry. I don’t think—I don’t think I can do this. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to keep remembering.”
“Touch me.”
My hands stop fidgeting. “Saxon.”
“See me while I see you.”
It’s then I hear it, among the imaginary crackling fireplace and the branches clawing at the window—the raw vulnerability underlying the self-assured command.
A protest leaps to my tongue but my fingers have a mind of their own.
I discard his shirt, letting it fall to the mattress beside me, before shifting forward on the bed so I can reach him.
My thumb grazes the corded muscle linking his shoulder with his neck. With the slightest pressure, I skim north, only to find his head already bowed.
“Keep going,” he husks out, “breathe for me.”
It’s not until my palm flattens across his back that I realize he isn’t breathing at all.
He kneels, breath drawn in, and waits for me to pass judgment.
There’s no light, nothing to guide the direction of my hands, and yet I follow the hills of his shoulder blades and the valley of his spine. I touch him as though I’ve spent years memorizing every rigid line of his body. And, with each pass, I feel my heart fracture just a little more.
Scars are scattered across his back.
Some overlap, crisscrossing in feathered batches that churn my stomach and remind me that not all nightmares have the luxury of being locked behind a door of slumber.
“Tell me what you see, Isla.”
He’s not asking about the firm, hardened flesh beneath my fingertips. Collateral, that’s how he put it in the car—and yet this moment feels like nothing less than trust being earned both ways.
I can’t hide the quiver in my voice when I speak. “In my dreams I feel remorse like a living, breathing entity. It clings to me”—like thorny veins crawling over my thighs and keeping me restrained—“and holds me captive. When I struggle to escape, I see his blood dripping from somewhere up above. It lands on my hands, my feet, the rest of me . . .”
The base of my palm collides with a scar that stretches from his left hip to just under his armpit. A second later, he takes that much-needed breath, letting it fill his lungs so that my hand rises with the inflation.
“Where did this come from?” I whisper. Where did all of these come from?
He exhales. “I don’t remember.”
Something tells me that he isn’t lying—with the number done to his flesh, I can’t imagine he’s able to keep track of each wound and every injury.
I want to wrap my arms around him.
Promise him that he’s not alone.
He beats me to the proverbial punch, asking, “How do you wake yourself up?”
Sometimes I scream myself awake.
Sometimes I pray for a reprieve and pretend that none of it is real.
Most times Josie shakes me until I’m stumbling my way out of another nightmare, lying about what I see in my dreams, and then sitting at our tiny kitchen table until the sun kisses the morning sky and I remember what it’s like to breathe all over again.
My hands drift north, over the slopes of his muscular shoulders to the soft strands of his midnight hair. “I let it swallow me whole. Until there’s nothing left for the guilt to grab onto, until I’m left alone for another day.”
When I trace the shell of his ear, dipping to the hollow behind his lobe, he stiffens. I expect him to jerk my hand away, as he did when I tried to touch his mouth earlier today, but he holds himself still, a map of secrets that he’s given me to decipher.
I could live another fifty years and still not understand everything there is to know about this man.
“There’s a certain beauty in the dark,” he utters gruffly. “The light shows us what we want the world to see, but the night—the blackness that visits each time we lay down to sleep—it understands us. It clings like toxin, like disease, until we remember that it’s the shadows that shape us. The sun needs our silhouette, just like we need its warmth.”
My fingers fall from his head to grip my knees. “Two halves of a whole.”
Silently, he pushes himself to his feet, then loops his hands around my wrists to tug me off the bed. He leads me to the door, then steps to the side. “Good night, Isla.”
I want him to ask that I stay.
He doesn’t.
“Good night, Saxon.” Throat tight, I step over the threshold. Then, pausing, I look back over my shoulder. “When did you learn to embrace it—the darkness?”
“The day I was taught that help never comes, not even when you beg for it.”
And then he closes the door, the lock audibly turning over, leaving me stuck on the other side, both with his scars and mine.
26
Saxon
With one elbow planted on the desk, I rake my fingers through my hair, letting them rest on my nape. Less than an arm’s length away, the dimmed computer screen continues to mock me, baiting me to pull the proverbial lever and confirm what I already suspect in my gut.
“Do it,” I grunt under my breath, “get it done.”
I reach for the mouse, fully intending to do just that, only . . . Only, at the last second, I shove the chair back and launch to my feet instead.
Fuck!
Twisting away, I clamp my hands down over the back of my head. Dig my thumbs into my skull.
It shouldn’t be this hard.
I’ve spent my entire life manipulating people into giving me intelligence, only to pin my target to the metaphorical wall. I do it without remorse. I do it without consideration for how my actions affect anything, or anyone, but the mission at hand. Even with Father Bootham—a man of God and a kind soul at that—I feel nothing but agitation at being confined to a confessional each week.
Ruthless. Savage.
It’s what I am. It’s who I am.
And still, I’ve sat in this damn room for close to an hour. Deliberating. Seesawing. Battling indecision with resolution, as though I can simply snap my fingers and cut the strings binding me to Holyrood and the queen.
The part of me wanting to lay the blame somewhere puts it at Isla’s feet. She came to me tonight. Every one of my senses attuned to her entering my bedroom. The quickness of her breath. The way she begged me to step out of the shadows and reveal myself, all while knowing that I wouldn’t.