Page 13

LIA

I sabelle did have tampons—my brand, go figure. She also had extraordinarily high-end face serums, creams, and hand lotions, because of course I fucking snooped. After I sorted my lady-parts out though, I sat for a minute on the toilet, feeling the weight of my future pressing down.

It was so heavy I should’ve fallen straight through the floor.

“Lia!” Rhaim shouted from wherever it was he’d gotten off to. “Stop thinking so hard!” he chided, and I groaned, caught.

“Fine!” I shouted back at him, flushed the toilet, and picked up my towel.

There was no point in getting dressed again—and I didn’t have any clothes that weren’t torn besides. I walked down a dimly lit hall into where I thought I’d heard his voice, and found him waiting for me, half naked on a very large bed.

At spotting me in the doorway, he patted the empty spot beside himself. “Turn off the light and come here.”

I turned off the light behind me readily.

Turning off the light in front of me, however, was a different creature.

But…Rhaim was here.

He would make sure I was safe.

I knew it—I had to know it—all my hopes for our future depended on it?—

“Lia,” he said, slightly more kindly, mistaking my hesitance for something it wasn’t. “I promise not to pounce on you.”

“Yeah?” I teased, forcing a smile.

“C’mere,” he said again, jerking his chin in my direction.

So I held my breath, turned off the light, and ran for the bed, until I could jump into it, almost as fast as the room around me went dark.

It wasn’t completely black though—he’d opened the curtains, which let in a substantial amount of light from the cityscape all around.

“Oh, thank God,” I whispered.

“Why?” he asked, grabbing me to haul me close, the second my knees met the mattress.

“Nothing,” I protested, fighting him a little, which he allowed, loosening his grip on me.

“I just—for a second it felt like everything that’d happened earlier was a dream,” I lied, nestling into his utter realness—the way he smelled like the soap we’d both used, the way his skin felt against mine, how fun it was to run my fingers through the hair upon his chest.

“I only wish part of it was,” he said, talking into the top of my head, as his own hands roamed my body without intent, like he just wanted to know more of me, but not in a biblical sense, and then he inhaled deeply. “You’re special, you know.”

I snorted against him. “I always have been,” I muttered, somewhere from the vicinity of his chest.

Special enough to be born a Ferreo.

Special enough for my uncle to torture me.

“No, Lia—I mean it.”

I somehow got my body a full millimeter closer to his in all dimensions. “How?”

“Because you know the real me. Isabelle…did not.”

I went still against him. I hadn’t been intending on continuing that plot thread unless he’d brought it up again—but now that he had, it was clear he had something to confess.

I rose up to my elbows slowly, so I could look down at him, and see the glitter of the nearby urban landscape in his eyes. “What happened?”

“She got a glimpse of my real life and ran away.” I felt my brow furrow as he went on.

“It was messier than that. We just had an unspoken arrangement, you know?” he said, not really asking, as he licked his lips and stared up at the ceiling.

“I wouldn’t bring work home, so to speak, and she wouldn’t ask—so I wouldn’t have to lie. ”

I knew what kind of work he meant, immediately. “Why’d you take up with her, Rhaim?” I’d always wondered what kind of magical glamour some other woman could have over him.

“I think—only with the benefit of introspection, because despite what you see on TV, men like me do not go to therapy—I wanted to try out something normal. Like something that would befit my station.”

I nodded softly. As CFO of Corvo Enterprises, it wouldn’t have looked good for him to be out tomcatting around. Plus, also, maybe, he was just curious.

Lord knew I was, having spent long enough on normal’s other-side.

Which…might be why I read so many goddamned books….

“But I should’ve known I’d hurt her,” he said, and then looked fully at me. “And, Lia, there’s a chance I might hurt you.”

“I doubt that,” I whispered to him.

“You might have to pretend to hate me, at some point in time, during our charade,” he countered, only half of his lips lifting into a grin.

“I feel capable of that, no problem,” I said, grinning back, before sobering. “But if you were going to hurt me…how?”

“By dying,” he said simply, like it wasn’t a frightening thought.

“Rhaim—” I hissed.

“No, little girl,” he said, cutting me off. “Let’s be honest with one another—because what’s the point of being truly in love, if you can’t be?”

I bit my lips instead of fighting him.

Look at that. Personal growth.

“I don’t want to. And I can tell you right now that I’d crawl out of a grave to see you, if I had it in me. But—if something happens to me—if I go to jail, you don’t know me. You completely write me off. Don’t send letters, don’t visit, nothing, do you hear me?”

“How come you get to be the one making all the rules?”

“Because I’m your Daddy, so knock it off,” he said, patting my cheek. “And if I die—you don’t come after me.”

It took me a moment to parse what he’d said. “Rhaim—” I said again, this time far more angrily.

“I’ve seen your fucking wrists. So hear me out—if I die, you can visit my grave, but if you come and see me even one second before God intended in the afterlife, I swear to you I will run the fuck away.”

My hands clenched into fists, and I moved to kneeling, furiously looking around so I could find something to throw—or maybe I could smother him with a pillow.

“I know how your mother died, Lia,” he went on, in an attempt to defuse me—and I opened my mouth to tell him why she’d died that way, and was trapped there, with the words choking in my throat, looking like a hungry baby bird.

After I’d burned our house down and my parents had sent me to boarding school I’d written my mother about my uncle. Praying that for once someone would understand me.

And rather than go and do anything useful about it, she’d up and killed herself from guilt.

Which was another reason, I was sure, why my silence on the subject wouldn’t go away.

Because I’d already killed one person who I loved by telling them the truth.

What good could possibly happen if I told another?

“It’s all right,” he went on, stroking a soothing hand against my back. “Just promise me—no matter what happens to me,” he said, circling that hand around to cup my chin, using it to draw me back down to his side. “I want you to live.”

It was brutal, but if it was what he truly wanted, I could hardly do otherwise. “Okay.”

“Good,” he said, wrapping me even closer to him, and kissing the top of my head again. “Go to sleep little girl, and maybe I’ll fuck you again in the morning.”

And even as much as I fought it, not wanting to miss a moment of my time with him, I started drifting off.