Pitifully, she began to weep.
He couldn’t watch.
He should not have to watch.
He hated this. He hated this so much.
This was every terrible moment of his childhood. His dread of visits from the man their mother called their “uncle,” which began with lavish gifts and devolved within days into drunken scenes. Outraged remarks slurred through sour breath. His mother pleading with the stumbling drunkard who would not acknowledge the fear he’d caused them in the morning.
Adam wanted to run as fast as he could away from here.
But Seraphina was right. He was too bloody nice. Too nice to let her stomp her way right off a cliff.
He let out a deep sigh and did the only thing there was to do. He picked her up and slung her over his shoulder and carried her up the hill to her terrace.
She cried brokenly onto his shoulder as he walked the paces to the house. Her tears falling on him made him angrier, but he let her cry. He opened the terrace doors and took her inside. Tompkins was waiting.
Tompkins stared at Sera, then at him, with a quiet kind of anguish. “I was worried it might come to this. I hid the wine before I left but she always finds it.”
He nodded wordlessly. It chilled him how Tompkins’s tone held no surprise. It reminded him of his mother: I dumped out all the spirits, but he found more.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll take her upstairs to her bed.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sera cried bitterly as Adam cleaned gravel from her palms.
After hours outside in the wind, the house was too warm, and an unpleasant flush stung her cheeks.
“Ow!” she cried as he rubbed none too tenderly at a cut. She enjoyed making her face accusatory. He was tending her to make a point about how good he was, as if to prove that she was bad. His very presence made her angry.
She’d never claimed she was good.
She’d tried to warn him.
She just wanted him to leave.
She shimmied away to evade his grip but succeeded only in falling against the dressing table, which lodged into her hip and made her entire body ring with pain.
“Damnation!” Tears overtook her again and she collapsed onto the floor, burying her face in the bedskirts.
“Sera, you’re scaring me,” Adam said quietly. “You’re going to hurt yourself. I want you to take off that dirty gown and then I’m putting you in bed.”
“No,” she moaned. “Go away.”
She hated for him to see her this way and yet part of her wanted him to see. Now he would know without question that his affection was wasted on her.
She was like a dead cockle washed up on the shore. Hard and spiny and gleaming on the outside, but hiding a soft and rotting creature that splashed foul-smelling ooze on those brave enough to pick it up.
“Sera,” he said, with desolation in his voice. “Come here.”
He pulled her to himself and hugged her. She cried harder, that he was sweet even through his anger.
His kindness only made her more despairing, because she could see it plainly in his eyes that he was done with her. This was why she didn’t try. You let people closer and it hurt worse when they saw who you really were. When you bared your soul to them and they said, “You’re just drunk, go to bed.”
She knew how this would end. He would go, and she would be left with this feeling she wanted so badly not to have. This desperate desire to be comforted.
Adam loosened his grip on her. “Can you stand up?” he asked quietly.
Hold me. I’m so sad.
“Go away,” she sniffled.
“Sera, what happened?”
What happened? Of all the bloody goddamned questions. Suppose she actually answered him?
Well, Adam, my baby died. I was thrown away like rubbish by everyone I loved without a bloody backward glance. It cost me everything and it cost him nothing and I’m still not safe from it and it’s not fair that I’m so ravaged and so angry, and that you’re looking at me like that, like you finally see how hopelessly ruined I am.
“Stop looking at me like that! Why won’t you leave?” she shouted. “Go away.”
He did not even flinch. “Because you need to sleep and I am not going to let you do so in a heap on the floor.”
She bounded angrily onto her feet. She may be weaving, but by God, she was standing. She dropped her bodice to the ground, and her skirt after it. She ripped off her stays and shift and threw them across the room.
She walked toward him, naked except for her stockings. “If you must stay and gape at me, then fuck me like I asked. Properly this time. Throw me down and choke me until I come.”
She said these words to make him go away, but she wanted it all the same. Sex. The brutal kind. Fingers in her hair, around her throat. Her body used so hard she didn’t have to be inside it. She could retreat to a place somewhere above the headboard and simply watch.
Adam shook his head. “My God, Sera, can you see yourself?”
He took her shoulders and turned her to face the dressing table, where even in the dim light her outline was ragged. Her hair was in knots, her stockings were torn and her knees were red and skinned from where she’d fallen. But the worst bit was her face, crumpled and puffy from the wine and spirits and red with her tears.
The sight of herself was strangely calming.
“Yes, I do see myself, Adam. I’ve always seen myself. Do you see me? Finally?”
He closed his eyes like the sight of her made him sick. “This is not who you are unless you want it to be,” he said. “You’re drunk.”
“Yes, I am drunk,” she hissed. “But you’re pious and I’m bored of you.”
His mouth formed a tight line. She could see him, wishing to snap at her, controlling himself. Being ever so reasonable. How she hated it.
“Fine,” he said in a defeated voice, “I won’t continue with you in this state. And if you wish to drink this much, if you can’t see how you’re hurting yourself—”
“I’m not the one who hurts me!” she cried. “If you only knew the things that have happened to me—”
“Things happen,” he said in that terribly calm voice. “Life is full of painful things that happen. We have a choice in whether we try to heal ourselves or wallow in despair and right now you are choosing to destroy yourself and I refuse to watch you do it.”
“Wise Adam Anderson,” she sneered.
He shook his head, picked his coat up from the back of her chair, and walked out of the room without another word.
She threw herself on top of the coverlet and sobbed, noisily, hoping he would hear her, take pity, and come back. She wanted him to hold her and comfort her just as badly as she wanted the abrading feeling of his scorn.
But he didn’t come back.
She cried until her eyes hurt so badly that she closed them.
When she opened them, it was morning.
She was splayed out in only her stockings on the counterpane. Her mouth was full of cotton and her head throbbed with a percussive insistence that made her feel like someone was inside it, beating her brains with a skillet. Her chest felt hot, her knees and hands burned with the cuts and scratches from her fall, her hip was mottled black and purple.
But what was worse was the memory of what she’d done. She blinked, the sun in her eyes burning brighter with every sliver that came back.